


Blue Star

by iputthepaininpainting



Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Angst and Fluff and Smut, F/M, Force Bond (Star Wars), Post-Canon, Post-Star Wars: The Last Jedi, Reylo - Freeform, Slow Burn, Star Wars: The Last Jedi Spoilers
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-04-18
Updated: 2018-09-19
Packaged: 2019-04-24 18:55:00
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 8
Words: 58,870
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14361555
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/iputthepaininpainting/pseuds/iputthepaininpainting
Summary: After the events of The Last Jedi, Kylo Ren and Rey once again find themselves on opposite ends of this galactic conflict. But nothing can be the same, not after what they did, and the uncertainty of the future only drives them closer together in a galaxy that wants nothing more than to keep them apart.





	1. Death of the General

**Author's Note:**

> Welcome to my personal Reylo hell! I promise I'll try to update this as regularly as possible and not abandon it. Feel free to pester me about finishing it if I trail off. As always, comments, suggestions, and constructive criticisms are welcome. I write fanfic to improve my writing, so I love feedback. Otherwise, enjoy my pain!

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Resistance must deal with the fallout of the battle of Crait. Meanwhile, Kylo must say goodbye to his mother, who doesn't have long to live.

* * *

 

Rey lifts her head from the bedside when she hears a very small noise in the dead of the night. Finn and Poe sit on the couch in the corner of Leia’s med-bay room, which has been reserved just for her. Rose, who has healed since the Battle of Crait but who still walks with a crutch, is leaning her head on Finn’s shoulder, and all three are passed out asleep. Even BB-8 is in battery-saving mode, dormant under Poe’s chair, so Rey is confused for a bit as she tries to find the source of the noise. Until she turns her eyes on the figure in the bed. She starts upright in her chair, staring at Leia.

“What are you doing awake?” she whispers softly, picking up the General’s wrinkled hand and enfolding between both of her own. Leia manages a watery smile. Her breathing is labored in the wake of the heart attack and subsequent lung infection that has decimated her body since the Battle of Crait. It’s only been a few weeks, but then, a lot can happen in a few weeks, as Rey herself is painfully aware.

“Just wanted to see if you were still here. It can’t be entertaining to watch a sick old woman sleep,” Leia rasps. Rey presses Leia’s hand to her lips.

“Of course I’m here. I’m not leaving until I see you on your feet again, we’ve been over this,” Rey insists, returning the smile. Leia just shakes her head ever-so-slightly on the pillow.

“Oh Rey, stop lying to yourself. I’ve made my peace with it. Make yours.”

The girl squeezes Leia’s hand tightly.

“No,” she insists. “You can’t leave us. Why would you try to leave us now, when we need you the most?”

“You don’t need me,” said Leia, still smiling. “The Resistance isn’t beaten, not by a long shot. But if we’re going to succeed, the mantle needs to pass on to the next generation. To you.”

“Me? No, I couldn’t- we shouldn’t even talk about this,” Rey stammered. “You’re going to get better. No one could ever replace you, especially not me-”

“It will be you, Rey,” Leia insists. The woman has to pause and focus on breathing for a few seconds, and her brow furrows as the strain of this simple action takes its toll on her. Then she continues. “I couldn’t think of anyone better to name as my successor. The other Generals respect you. And you have a good set of Lieutenants to surround yourself with. I know you have it in you, and I believe you can do this. So will you do me a favor?”

“Of course. Anything,” Rey whispers.

“Believe in yourself the way I believe. Trust in the Force.”

“I… I will, always. But Leia, why are you saying all of this?”

“Because my time is coming, Rey. And I can’t be at peace until I’ve said certain things. If now’s not the time to say them, when is?”

Rey can’t bring herself to laugh. Tears well up in her eyes, spill over her lashes, and drip onto their folded hands.

“Do… do you want me to wake them up? Do you want me to fetch someone?” Rey asks the General, nodding towards her sleeping friends. Leia just shakes her head again, her smile growing ever wider under gentle dark eyes.

“No, let them sleep. I can say what I need to say to you.”

“What is it?”

“Oh, just a little advice,” Leia chuckles, “for when you take my place.”

“I can’t take your place, no one can!” Rey insists, laying her cheek against Leia’s fingers tenderly.

“I know you’ll do your best,” Leia replies, “And I wouldn’t expect anything less. Your best is all you can give, after all, and it’ll be just what the Resistance needs. Just remember a few things. Don’t let Poe get uppity with you; slap ‘im if he thinks for a second he’s in charge. Also, Finn will make a fine Lieutenant, so keep him close. Do the same for Rose: she’s a good kid. You’re all good kids who’ll go far, as long as you hold onto your grit. Got that? Now Rey, once you’re a General, always remember to wear a dress to formal events. Preferably a nice one: appearances matter. But make sure it’s still a dress you can kick ass in. And strap a blaster to your leg under the skirt- or a lightsaber, in your case. And you had better fix that lightsaber, by the way. It belonged to my brother, and our father before him, so take care of it.”

Rey waits for something else- for an admonishment, for a tip on leadership, for some sage advice on how to inspire followers and win the war. But that seems to be the end of Leia’s speech, because shortly after that, the General sinks back into the pillows and lets out a sigh. Her eyes slip closed, the smile still bright on her face. Rey feels her throat clench. She thinks for a second that this is it- that Leia Organa is just going to die right there and then- and she draws breath to yell aloud. She stops mid-breath when the General opens one eye again and looks at Rey with an amused glimmer in her gaze.

“What,” she chuckles weakly, “did you think I was gonna bite the dust right here and now? I’m just resting, sweetheart.”

Rey grins and wipes her cheeks dry on the back of one hand.

“Sorry. You scared me there for a second.”

“I know, sweetie. I know,” Leia says, giving Rey’s fingers a squeeze. It’s not a strong one, but the pressure is reassuring all the same. A pleasant blush creeps up to Rey’s face when Leia calls her ‘sweetie’. The girl may not have known Leia for very long, but the matronly warmth the woman exudes is a magnet to Rey, who aches for the touch and voice of a mother she never had. Leia seems to know this without being told. She takes Rey’s hand and holds it against her chest as she lays her head back and drifts off to sleep.

Rey steals a pillow from the empty bed next to them and leans it up against Leia’s thigh, then props her head there to go back to her nap. But she can’t seem to drop off like Leia can. The girl hasn’t slept much since Leia’s heart attack- she’s either been too worried, or too busy carrying out the bedridden General’s commands. The Resistance is so used to listening to Rey in place of General Organa by now, the girl can almost imagine why Leia thinks the she will make a suitable successor. Almost. But the idea of losing Leia is daunting to her all the same. What will she do without her? What will Finn and Poe and Rose do? What will all of them do?

And a small part of her mind cries out from the dark corner she’s shoved it in-

_What will Ben do?_

Rey, who has been trying to sleep but failing for the past few minutes, gives a bad-tempered huff and opens her eyes when this thought occurs to her.

She hasn’t seen or spoken to Kylo Ren since their brief Force-connection after the Battle of Crait. She considers this a mercy. She promised herself she would be there for him when he was ready, but even so, she still needs space so she can sort out her feelings about what happened. Neither of them can control when the connections happen, but the Force appears to be giving them a welcome break. She is willing to wait until he is ready, or until the Force wills them to come back together.

And yet, his presence is always a faint, throbbing pulse in the back of her mind, no matter how hard she tries to close herself off from him. She knows she is in his thoughts as much as he is in hers, since she occasionally feels tremors of his emotions ripple through the Bond into her, and vice versa. She wonders if she can voluntarily open up that connection now. She wonders if she _should._

Rey sits up and leans over the bed again, giving the General’s hand a squeeze. Leia doesn’t wake at first, but when Rey whispers her name, her dark eyes flutter open.

“What is it, sweetheart?” she rasps, her voice cracking again. Her lungs are wheezing on the inhale again, and it’s hard for Rey to ignore the sound.

“Do… do you want me to… try and reach out to your son?” the girl stammers, her cheeks flaming bright red. She glances at her sleeping friends in the corner to make sure none of them are stirring. Leia is the only person she’s told about the Force Bond since Luke’s death, and she wants to make sure the others don’t hear. She doesn’t think they’re ready to know- not yet. The General’s brow furrows.

“Why would you reach out to him at a time like this?” she wonders.

“I don’t… I dunno. I just thought you might like to talk to him one last time. I know… I know he killed Han and you can’t forgive that-”

“You’re wrong,” Leia interrupts. Rey glances up sharply. “Of course I was angry at first, but… I forgave him the moment you told me what he said. I know he didn’t want to. I know it’s not his fault.”

Rey smiles consolingly at Leia, and her voice grows in confidence as she insists-

“Exactly. He loved Han, and he loves you still. He always did, and he always will, no matter how hard he tries to deny it. He would want to say goodbye to you. I… I can’t promise anything, but I might be able to reach him. If you want.”

“You don’t have to do this for me.”

“I… I want to. I don’t want you to have any regrets. Besides… Ben would be heartbroken if he didn’t get to say goodbye to you.”

She could be mistaking it, but she is almost sure she sees a glimmer of happy tears in the General’s eyes when she hears this. Leia glances at Finn and the others. When she is satisfied that they are still asleep, she looks back to Rey and nods.

“Let’s try it. Together.”

“Together,” Rey agrees.

The two women entwine their hands tightly and close their eyes. Rey’s head bows and a slight frown creases her face as she concentrates on opening her senses up to the Force.

It takes a few minutes, since Rey is still new to the concept of using the Cosmic Force in these subtle ways, and Leia is for the most part untrained. But eventually, Rey feels her consciousness in the Force brush up against Leia’s. She recognizes it instantly, for although it is weaker now, it is still an unmistakable mirror of her strong personality. The two women struggle to bring their minds closer to each other. Leia relies on Rey’s physical touch in order to open up the brief connection between them. Rey relies on it too, since she’s never had experience with trying to connect with a person where no Bond is already present. She has to pry and wriggle in order to get their connection wide enough, but finally, they are both ready. They won’t be able to maintain this forever, but they are ready to try.

With Leia present in the Force right next to her, Rey turns and dives into the back of her mind where she has blocked off her Bond with Kylo. Unlike with Leia, the response is nearly instant. Kylo’s mind is dormant in sleep when she reaches out for it, but the moment he senses her presence in the Force, he lurches awake as if she touched him with a hot iron. She can almost feel the sheets tangle around him as he sits bolt upright, she can almost see the dark bedroom as he looks around him with wild eyes, she can almost hear the quiet hum of the engines on his ship. A thrill of hope runs through him, and a weak flare of joy as he realizes that their Bond is still present, still strong, that Snoke was lying about being the one who created it, and that Rey was not cutting him off after all.

But that joy flickers and dies as quickly as it came. No words or coherent thoughts have to pass between them. In those moments, he feels what she feels, knows what she knows. As surely as she can sense his surroundings, so he can sense hers. He smells the faint stink of sanitizer in the med-bay, feels Leia’s hands pressed between Rey’s, hears the labored rasp of the woman’s breathing. He knows Leia is dying.

A single word echoes across the Bond: barely the ghost of a thought, but clear in shape.

_Mother?_

Rey can tell that Leia hears him by her sharp gasp, and the way her fingers tighten around the girl’s, as if she is trying to touch her son through Rey.

“Ben?” she whispers, her voice cracking.

Kylo presses against the boundaries of Rey’s mind. He’s not trying to break in as he was when he had interrogated her all those weeks ago. Instead he’s urging her, no- begging her- to open her eyes so he can see Leia through her. She feels his desperation as if it was her own, and this brings fresh tears to her face. But Leia is pressing against Rey’s mind too, trying to use the Bond and get a glimpse of Kylo. The girl almost can’t take the strain of being caught between these two powerful Force-sensitives, and she knows that if she opens her eyes, her concentration will break and the tenuous connection between mother and son will dissolve.

 _I’m sorry Ben, I can’t show her to you. I’m not strong enough,_ she thinks towards him. His disappointment is palpable. _Just listen. She needs to speak to you._

He eases up a little, and Rey exhales with relief.

“He’s with us,” she says to Leia, her voice soft and trembling with the tears she is still shedding. “He can hear you. Speak to him.”

“…Ben,” Leia murmurs. Her voice is all sorrow and longing and tenderness. “My little boy… though not so little anymore, I suppose. People tell me you’re tall now,” she chuckles. Rey hears the General’s voice crack and realizes that the older woman is crying too.

_Mother…_

Leia doesn’t hear him this time. The woman forges on, but unlike when she spoke to Rey, she is un-confident, as if she doesn’t know how to express her love and pain in mere words.

“Ben… My time is nearing. I… I just need you to know how sorry I am. Your father and I, we never should have sent you away so young. We should have been there for you. We should have listened to you, and instead we left you all alone with your own darkness. But I know that the good man I raised is still there inside you. I… I love you. Nothing will change that, no matter what you have done. And I forgave you for everything long ago… if you will just come back to us, come back to _me_ , I forgive you.”

Leia seems to lose the ability to speak after this. Or maybe it’s her ability to breathe that’s compromised- either way, the stream of whispered words cuts off as she dissolves into quiet weeping. It is frightening for the girl to witness this woman, who always seems so indomitable, break down like this.

Rey can feel something in Kylo breaking too, even from this distance. It’s like listening to cracks race across glass. He tries to say something to his mother, but it doesn’t make it all the way past Rey and into Leia. The girl is struggling to keep both connections open at once, and she can’t seem to put their minds in direct contact- not across the entire galaxy. His bond with his mother is not the same as his Bond with Rey. His anguish is powerful when he realizes that Leia can’t hear him, so he turns to Rey.

_Please help me... I need to tell her…_

Rey swallows hard. It is taxing her concentration to do all of this at once. She has the raw strength, but not the skill to keep this up. Her voice is halting and unsteady as she passes the message on.

“He says… he… he still loves you too. And he never blamed you. He didn’t want to kill Han, and he wishes things… things had been different. There was a part of him… all this time… that missed you and wanted to come home. But he can’t. He wants t-to make it right but… doesn’t know how to.”

Leia tries to form words, but for the first time in her life, fails. Rey feels her despair, and she feel’s Kylo’s mirroring despair. It almost too much for her heart to bear, for them to be so close and yet so far away. She wishes she could just bridge the gap between them and let them communicate directly, for the last time, but she doesn’t have the skill to keep such a connection open over lightyears. Not for more than a second. But maybe… maybe a second is enough.

 _Ben,_ Rey thinks, _I can’t keep this up much longer. But I can give you one thing. Be ready._

She feels Kylo’s mind draw closer as she turns to Leia. The girl holds the button on the hospital bed until Leia is sitting up, then she takes the woman’s hands and places them on her cheeks, so Leia is holding her face gently. She whispers aloud,

“When I open my eyes, I’m going to open my mind to him, and to you. He’ll be able to see and feel you the way I do, but just for a second. I’m sorry that this is all I can give you, I… I’m not strong enough to do any more,”

“It’s okay.” Leia says with a shaky nod. “Whenever you’re ready.”

Rey pauses. She inhales once, then exhales. She centers herself, as Luke taught her to on Ahch-To. One by one, she strips down the defenses she has placed around her mind, and wills herself to become a bridge. She can feel Kylo tentatively edging inside of her consciousness, as if afraid to enter uninvited. The gradual feeling of oneness is not as scary as she thought it would be. Leia cannot mirror Kylo’s skill at entering the mind of another, but she is close enough to Rey in the Force that it just might work, if Rey gives it an extra push-

Rey summons up every scrap of her willpower, and pulls on both of their minds as hard as she can, tugging them towards one another-

All of a sudden, it is like she has been moved aside within her own body, and another has taken control of her senses so that she is watching from afar.

For a moment- one beautiful, painful moment- the love and anguish of mother and son intertwine across the galaxy, and though neither can say anything, the depth of their emotions are laid bare. All of the turmoil in Kylo comes to a grinding halt. Leia is at utter peace, because although she is looking into Rey’s eyes and holding Rey’s face in her hands, she is looking into the soul of her son. Kylo is staring back at her, feeling the soft, papery warmth of Leia’s palms on his cheeks, and they are seeing each other- _truly_ seeing each other- for the first time in almost twenty years.

And then it is too much for Rey. She falls into a momentary faint, and the connection is gone. Kylo and Leia’s minds snap apart like rubber bands, yanked back away from each other by the physics of space-time.

Leia catches Rey when she slumps in her seat. The woman’s breath is wheezing in her chest. Her eyes are wide with shock, her cheeks pale and streaked with tears. The General holds Rey’s head against her shoulder, clutching the girl tight in her arms as if holding onto the last vestiges of her son. His presence is no longer there except as an echo within the Force, but she knows that she saw him, that he was with her in that split second. She is sure of it.

Rey comes to moments later, and finds Leia holding onto her as if for dear life. The old woman’s strength is failing and the rhythm of her breathing is shaky. Rey can feel it under her ear. But the smile on Leia’s face is serene, and she is no longer weeping. She strokes the girl’s hair tenderly.

“Thank you. Thank you so much, Rey.”

“Did I do alright?” the girl murmurs groggily. Her limbs feel heavier than the center of a dwarf star, and it takes way too much effort to press the button to lower Leia’s bed back down. Rey doesn’t bother sit up, but lays there with her head cushioned on Leia’s shoulder. She loops an arm around Leia as the woman kisses her head ever-so-gently.

“You did wonderful, sweetie. I am so grateful.”

They fall asleep in a warm embrace, and pass the rest of the night in peace.

…

Rey wakes up the moment the flat-line alarm on Leia’s heart monitor goes off, but not because of the noise. She is dragged back into consciousness by a sudden, sharp pain in her ribcage. A bestial howl rises up in her ears, drowning out every other sound. The girl clutches her chest and turns her eyes, which are rapidly filling with agonized tears, towards Leia. The General still has her arms around Rey, and the woman’s smiling face is turned towards the window of her little room in the med-bay. The sun is rising in the purple sky outside of the base, and it is beautiful. Leia’s eyes are dull now, with the sunrise imprinted upon them, a final burning image.

Rey cannot form words or coherent thoughts- the pain is too much. She feels Finn’s arms slide around her and pull her away from Leia, towards the other bed. She does not- she _cannot_ \- resist him. Her eyes stream with tears as he lays her down and slides a comforting hand up and down her back. The howl is finally starting to fade from her ears. It appears that no one else can hear the noise, since they are all talking to each other as normal. She catches a few phrases here or there. Poe screams ‘do something!’ at a nurse, grabbing the railing of Leia’s hospital bed with white knuckles. The doctor shakes his head and the words ‘Can’t… DNR- Do Not Resuscitate… legally binding’ come out of his mouth, interspersed with other words that Rey doesn’t catch. Rose is standing next to Poe and crying. She is shaking from the force of her sobs, and she has to grab his arm for support before she unbalances and loses her crutch.

Eventually, Poe and Rose come to join Rey and Finn on the bed. Rose sits on Finn’s other side, and he pulls her close to him so she can bury her sobs in his shoulder. Poe perches next to Rey’s head and lays a warm hand on her hair. When she looks up, she sees that he is weeping too, now. His face is set and expressionless, but the pain in his eyes is almost as powerful as the physical pain in her chest. BB-8 makes a sad whining noise and lets his head fall against Poe’s knee.

The four of them sit on that bed around Rey in silence, watching as the other Generals and the remaining members of the Resistance’s command are summoned. Chewie arrives first and roars his grief. He smothers Poe in a desperate embrace, and his distress is so strong Rey can almost reach out and touch it. It takes the combined strength of three nurses to get him out of the room, which is too small for a Wookie in addition to all the people in there.

Generals Halsey and Avix arrive just after Chewie. Both of them go pale when they enter and see Leia’s body, neatly arranged on the coverlet with her hands folded over her chest and her eyes closed. Halsey keeps mopping her face with a handkerchief, and though General Avix is dry-eyed, his voice is grim as he says to Halsey-

“We’ve lost so much. Raddus and Holdo and Han… they should all be here. And you and me... we didn't even earn our rank. They just promoted us to replace all the Generals we lost. How could Leia just leave us like this?”

“She’s with Luke and Han now.”

“…You and me, we’re all that’s left, Halsey.”

“You and me… and Rey of Jakku,” Halsey corrects, sniffing her tears back. Avix eyes the girl from across the room, and Finn glares back as if daring him to say something. The Generals will honor Leia’s wishes to promote Rey to their own ranks- they’ve already discussed it together, and agreed upon it. It simply won’t do for the weakened and demoralized Resistance to lose one of its only remaining leaders, and then have no one to fill the empty place. Someone has to succeed Leia. They know that Rey is powerful, and that she has the potential to be a great leader in tandem with them. But she is young, untested. And so far, her lying in bed senseless from grief isn’t impressing Avix.

Rey eventually regains the ability to move and talk after Leia’s body has been covered and removed. The medical droids will clean it and prepare it for the funeral- a ceremony that Rey will have to help organize, according to the will Leia left behind. Though the scream in her ears fades away, the pain in Rey’s chest doesn’t leave her all that day or the next. It makes her lethargic and distant, as if she’s had a head injury. She makes herself move through it, even though she’s liable to burst into tears at any given moment if a fresh wave of grief and agony seizes her.

It takes her awhile to figure out what this pain is. It doesn’t make sense, after all. Sure, Leia was a Force-sensitive just like Rey, but they hadn’t been that closely attuned. They’d only known each other for a few weeks, and though they’d formed an instant bond of mutual affection and respect, it still isn’t enough to logically make her hurt this much.

 _Is it because she was like the mother I never knew?_ Rey wonders to herself a few days later, as she is standing for a seamstress to take measurements for a new dress to wear at the funeral.

But then her eyes snap wide open as it hits her. She realizes that it isn’t because Leia was like _her_ mother. It’s because Leia was _Kylo’s_ mother. That’s why the pain snapped her awake the split second Leia died. Kylo sensed his mother’s death as it happened, felt it, and was shattered by it. His grief was instant and powerful. The roaring she’d heard had been his voice all along, echoing across the lightyears through their Bond.

She can picture it now. The moment he felt Leia’s death, he screamed his rage and sorrow. He didn’t weep- Rey was weeping for him, shedding the tears he couldn’t afford to shed. He carried that agonizing grief dry-eyed. But that morning when he went about his business as Supreme Leader, no one would have been able to tell that he’d destroyed his room the night before and punched the wall so hard his knuckles bled. No one could tell that there was a physical ache in the place where his heart ought to be. No one could tell because he was unconsciously offloading it all on Rey- terrified to break his façade, even in mourning. Terrified to show weakness.

Rey considers closing herself off to the Bond again, to make his pain go away. She is about to do it- she is gathering herself to raise her mental defenses again, to shove the Bond back into its dark corner where it can do the least harm- but then she thinks of Kylo. She thinks of how he can barely handle it now, even with her taking the brunt of his anguish. She doesn’t like to think about what would happen if he broke down in front of the cutthroat commanders of the First Order. So she takes a deep breath, puffs out her chest, and decides that she will carry this burden for him. It is all she can do for him, now. She thinks that he has enough to worry about, doesn’t he? He already has too much hurt inside of him, too many wounds that haven’t closed yet. She is strong like steel, she tells herself. She can and will do this. She drills it into her head-

_Strong like steel. Strong like steel. Strong like steel._

And she finds that it works. The pain hasn’t gone away, of course- that will take time. But she knows that eventually it _will_ mend. Leia and Ben made their peace with each other. The wound of her death will heal correctly in him, and unlike all the others, it will not leave a scar. Rey is glad that she was able to make that happen, glad that she let mother and son say their goodbyes to each other. She holds onto that gladness, and with it, she is once again able to walk tall.

By the time the day of the funeral arrives, Rey has moved on from the pain. She is still sad, of course- the entire base bears a certain pall of despondency in the wake of their beloved General’s passing. But she has also made her peace with it, and she is ready to continue with the work that Leia began.

The day of the funeral dawns as bright as the morning Leia passed on, with the sun’s brightness setting the purple sky aflame. It said in her will that she wanted to be buried at sunrise rather than sunset, and it’s fitting. The Resistance is only a small crowd, for now. Everyone has turned out today, and they sit on makeshift benches in the ancient ruins where they were holding the ceremony.

The music is an old ballad, so old that the writer’s name is long-forgotten. The strains of the instrumental are gentle and yet powerful. The voice soars.

 

_When you're weary, feeling small;_

_When tears are in your eyes, I will dry them all._

_I'm on your side, oh, when times get rough_

_And friends just can't be found._

_Like a bridge over troubled water_

_I will lay me down_

_Like a bridge over troubled water_

_I will lay me down_

 

_When you’re down and out_

_When you’re on the street_

_When evening falls so hard,_

_I will comfort you._

_I’ll take your part_

_Oh when darkness comes_

_And pain is all around_

_Like a bridge over troubled water_

_I will lay me down_

_Like a bridge over troubled water_

_I will lay me down._

 

Rey thinks the music is beautiful. It plays in the background during the eulogies. She listens as first General Halsey and then General Avix give their speeches. There is a great deal of crying and eye-dabbing, but there is also a great deal of nostalgic smiling. Rey feels less grief and more appreciation: appreciation for the wonderful life Leia led, which they celebrate now. And appreciation for the hopeful future that Leia Organa would surely have wished upon her Resistance, no matter how beaten-down and little they were. Rey hasn’t felt this much hope in a long time.

The ceremony would be longer if everyone had their way. But the Resistance can’t afford to be outside in the open air for an extended period of time. Most of their base is underground, and its safety is based on secrecy. Thus, the ceremony is limited to three speeches, the procession, and the funeral itself. At one point everyone freezes in a panic when they think they’ve heard the whine of an engine overhead, but it is faint, and no one is sure if it was there at all or if it was just a gust of wind. The Resistance laughs it off, and the ceremony resumes.

The purple sky beautifully frames the ruins. The tumbles of ancient stone, tinged with veins of green and orange and yellow, form a sort of dais upon which the Resistance has built a pyre. The pyre is bare as of yet, but as soon as the speeches are over, the body will be brought up. Halsey has spoken. Now Avix wraps up his short speech. As he descends from the dais, it is Rey’s turn to speak.

She rises from her seat in the front row and brushes off her skirt. The dress she wears- the only dress she owns, as it was made specifically for the funeral- is a soft tone of dark grey that is almost black. The skirt is modest, ankle-length. It falls gracefully from her hips without touching the ground, and the short slashes up either side give her space to move freely. The halter top hides her chest but bares her shoulders, and her shiny General’s pin- which Leia bequeathed to Rey in her will- is fixed over her left breast. She feels quite regal as she passes Avix on the stairs and takes her place by the broken-off pillar which has been designated as the podium.

“I did not know General Organa for years and years, as the esteemed Generals Avix and Halsey have,” she begins. She has this short speech memorized. Finn and Rose helped her with it, and she is proud of it. Not only does it honor Leia’s memory nicely, in her opinion, but it also makes Rey seem intelligent and poised. Ready to carry on Leia’s legacy.

“- and yet in the time I knew her,” Rey continues, “she became both a mentor and a friend to me. I know we will all miss her wit and her dry sense of humor dearly.”

The crowd chuckles. The girl smiles and waits for them to be done before continuing. But as she is looking out over them, she notices a figure in a cowl and dark cloak slip in from the side of the ruins. She doesn’t recognize the latecomer- the figure’s face is cast into shadow by the hood. They don’t remove it as they sit on the end of one of the makeshift benches. The moment she sees the figure, Rey feels an odd sort of stirring in her senses, in the very back of her mind. She can’t pinpoint it. She realizes that the crowd has stopped laughing and she must continue, so she tears her eyes from the newcomer and resumes her speech.

And yet, as she recites the lines she wrote with such care, she suddenly feels as though she doesn’t belong here. The dress is too tight around her throat. She doesn’t know what to do with her hands. Her speech is stiff and pre-prepared, too rehearsed, and it doesn’t sound like her at all. Her words about hope and perseverance, love and the will to continue, determination and morality, sound hollow to her as they fall from her lips. Her eyes keep sliding back to the dark, hunched figure of the newcomer, and it is all she can do not to frown at them in confusion. What is it about-

She realizes, a little belatedly, that she has finished her speech. It is well-rehearsed, so she doubts anyone except Finn and Rose noticed the difference. She smiles at the applauding crowd, then moves aside to make room for the high command to take their places next to her. The three Generals line up closest to the pyre. The rest of the Resistance rises and files to the ends of their rows, stepping around the scattered flower arrangements and various black ribbons hung about the ruins. Everyone lines up along the aisle between the seats and looks back at the remains of the archway, waiting for the procession to begin. Everyone except the newcomer, who sits at the end of their row with their hood titled towards Rey. She swears she can feel eyes boring out of that shadow, and the faint buzz in the Force grows stronger.

The music changes to a soft, swaying march. All eyes turn to watch as the pallbearers carry Leia’s body into the ruins and start up the aisle. The General is dressed in an old white dress of hers, with her hair braided in the Alderaanian style and flowers tucked into her collar, sleeves, and the belt around her waist. Her face is serene, if pale, and it looks as if she is just sleeping and could rise up at any minute to berate them for staying outside too long and risking the secrecy of the base-

“Stop.”

The voice is not loud, but all the same, its commanding tone is unmistakable. The music grinds to an awkward halt as the pallbearers pause in the aisle. Rey’s eyes go wide and her breath catches in her throat, because she recognizes that voice. The Resistance turns to look at the dark figure of the newcomer, who has risen from their seat at last.

A pair of pale hands flicks the hood down to reveal none other than Kylo Ren.

No one in current company but Rey, Finn, Poe, and Chewie have seen Kylo’s face close-up without the mask. Rey is too shocked to say anything. His eyes are on her, boring into her, and his expression is so ambivalent that she can’t read it at all. Now that he’s revealed himself, his presence in the Force solidifies and she recognizes what she’s been feeling. He was distorting his own Force-signature to hide himself from her- until this moment.

Chewie roars aloud in surprise in confusion. He yanks his bowcaster from its holster on his back. But he doesn’t shoot- just points it in Kylo’s general direction. Chewie growls aloud. He warns Kylo that if he makes a wrong move, he’ll blast him again and he won’t miss this time.

Finn and Poe, on the other hand, are scrabbling for their blaster. The look in Finn’s eyes is utter panic and fear- he’s going to shoot Kylo right then and there.

Rey holds a hand out and yells,

“No! Wait! Everybody wait!”

She uses the Force to pull Finn and Poe’s blasters away from them. They clatters on the stones ten feet away. The betrayal in Finn’s eyes when he looks up at her makes her flinch, but she just shakes her head at him. He presses his lips into a thin line and glares at Kylo with intense hatred. Poe seems to recognize that Rey has a plan, because he puts a hand on Finn’s arm to keep him still. Kylo’s hand had twitched towards his belt when he saw the guns, but he hasn’t drawn his lightsaber yet. He is still staring at Rey. Tense silence falls as the Resistance look in confusion from Kylo to Rey and back, wondering who this man is and why Chewie, Poe, and Finn are so angered.

“… What do you want, Ben?” Rey asks, still holding her hands out defensively.

He glances briefly at the pallbearers and the body on the litter. When he looks back at her, his eyes have a feverish sparkle in them. She doesn’t like the look of that crazed gleam, and she realizes that grief has not done good things to him. His presence in the Force throbs like over-heated metal.

“I came to do what is my right,” he tells her. His voice is surprisingly calm, though his face betrays him as always, and she can feel his swirling emotions through their Bond. Rey looks around her, then at him, and finally makes a decision.

“… Let him through,” she commands. To her pleasant surprise, most of the people actually obey her command. Avix grabs her arm and hisses,

“Who is this man? What do you think you’re doing-”

“-General, if you don’t want to die today, you’ll let him do what he came to do. I’m trying to end this without bloodshed,” she insists quietly, her eyes trained on Kylo the whole time, watching for any sign of aggression. She hopes it won’t come to a fight, but she will defend her friends if he tries anything, even if it’s with her bare hands. She is confident that she is strong enough in the Force to hold him off if she needs to, and she tries to project this to him. If he feels this message coming through the Bond, he doesn’t give any sign. He turns away from her and fixes his gaze on his mother now. Slowly, deliberately, he crosses the ruins and comes up to the pallbearers. They bring the litter down from their shoulders when he gestures with one hand.

“Step aside,” he commands, dangerously quiet. The two pallbearers who are in his way oblige, scurrying away towards the seats. He bends over the litter and ever-so-gently slides his arms underneath his mother’s body. The linen bindings under the dress keep her limbs in place as he lifts her up. He glances at her face once, then looks around him, scrutinizing. Some of the Resistance fighters are getting antsy, their hands twitching towards their holstered blasters as they try to figure out whether or not to shoot him. He sees this and then looks at Rey, as if warning her to get her people under control.

“Everybody just keep calm,” she says, making her voice as level as she can. She sounds surprisingly authoritative, and it works. Hands move away from blasters as Kylo starts up the aisle.  
He holds his mother’s body with an uncharacteristic tenderness. His face is stony as he gazes straight ahead of him at the pyre, but that twinge in Rey’s chest is back again, and she knows that this must be a mere shadow of what he is feeling. He passes her and the Generals without a word, ascending the ruined steps to the pyre. When he lays the body atop it, he is so careful that it looks like he’s laying an infant down to sleep. Indeed, Leia looks small compared to him, and the tender way he handles her body reinforces the image.

His fingers briefly brush over his mother’s face as he moves a strand of hair back from her forehead. He pauses to gaze down at Leia for a moment. Because he is facing away from the assembly, the only thing they see is the tense curl of his shoulders, which look right then as if they bear the weight of whole planets upon them. Then it passes. He turns and takes the torch from the brazier next to him, which has been lit and hung there for this specific purpose. He thrusts the torch into the kindling at the bottom of the pyre, then steps back a bit to watch. For a full minute, he and the Resistance gaze in silence at the rising column of smoke, the clamoring flames engulfing the pyre and the body atop it.

The wild, hopeful thought occurs to Rey that maybe he’s here to stay. Maybe he’s abandoned the First Order, and this is his return to the light. But then Kylo turns and starts back down the steps as if to leave, and her stomach sinks through the floor. He is going back to the First Order after all. Rey calls softly,

“Ben, wait.”

He stops on the bottom step and looks at her over his shoulder.

“…How did you find us?” she demands.

 _I will always be able to find you, Rey…_ she feels him whisper through the Force Bond, inaudible to anyone but the two of them. She shivers at the sound, and the realization dawns on her that he knew all along where she was. He could have found this base at any time he liked, though he chose not to. But aloud, to the Resistance, he lies about his methods.

“I was able to pinpoint Leia’s location through the Force the moment I sensed her death.”

“Then… then is this base compromised?” she stammers. They both know what she really means is, _Will you betray us? Will you betray_ me?

“Can you imagine what Hux would do if he knew I had come here?” he scoffs, his voice unspeakably bitter. “No, your location is safe with me. Although you might want to move anyway- I spotted your base from a league away. It’s really not that well-hidden.”

He’s turning again to leave when she calls out,

“If that’s the case, what’s to stop _us_ from contacting Hux and telling him exactly what you’ve done?”

He pauses again and says, without looking at her,

“…Do you know why I stayed with the First Order after I killed Snoke?”

“…Why?”

“Because if I had deserted the First Order, I would have left it in Hux’s control. And that would mean your total annihilation. Whatever you may feel about me, I assure you that I am the lesser of two evils. You want me as the Supreme Leader, not him. At least I have a moral code of sorts. Do we have an understanding?”

Rey glances at Generals Halsey and Avix. Both are staring at Kylo with thinly veiled horror, since they are now realizing who and what he is. In the crowd, Chewie has lowered his bowcaster, and is holding Finn by the shoulder to stop the young man from attacking Kylo. Rose has Poe by the arm, since the pilot’s face is a dangerous shade of bright red. Rey elbows Halsey, to get her attention.

“Well?” Rey hisses. The woman starts, meets Rey’s eyes, then looks back to Kylo. She swallows hard. Finally, she nods. Avix is too livid to do anything but glare, so Rey decides to take two out of three as a ‘yes’.

“We have an understanding,” she tells him.

“Good,” he says as he resumes walking towards the exit of the ruins. When he reaches the doorway he flips his hood back up and calls over his shoulder-

“I’ll be seeing you, Rey.”

On that ominous note, he enters the forest and disappears, melting away into the shadows like so much mist.

A long pause follows this in which no one dares to move, and few even dare to breathe. The only sound is the roar of the flames on the pyre.

Avix shatters this silence when he screams-

“Squad seven, after him! I want his head on a platter, I want him shot full of holes! I want that bastard dead, I want him-”

“General Avix, that’s enough!” Rey yells over him. “Nobody’s going after anyone!”

He rounds on her, his face red with fury.

“Kylo bloody Ren just waltzed onto our base! You think he’ll keep his word? The only way we survive is if we kill him before he can leave with knowledge of our location!”

“Send squad seven after him and every one of those men dies,” Rey retorts, her voice surprisingly even and calm. “He came here for one thing, and he did what he came here to do, but if you go after him he will kill all of those men without qualm. Not a single life has been lost yet. Don’t ruin this now, General.”

“The only thing that’ll be ruined is us, if we don’t kill him!” Avix roars. “He’ll bring the might of the whole First Order down on us, and if you believe that lie he told-”

“I believe him,” Halsey interrupts. She seems to have regained her calm now, and the analytical brain she is so well-known-for (which got her promoted to General in the first place) is kicking in.

“What?! How can you-”

“Think about it, Avix. What he said makes sense. You’ve seen Hux’s ruthlessness, you know what that bastard is like. If Ren reveals our location to Hux it will also reveal that Ren has been here, and that he came to his mother’s funeral, no less. Hux will know that it wasn’t a tactical move. He’ll see it as a sign of weakness in Ren. The First Order is unstable already, with the messy transition of power from Snoke. It wouldn’t take much of a push to depose Ren, and then where does that leave us? Ren might be evil scum, but he’s right. He does have a moral code of sorts, and he follows it. He might ignore the distinction between right and wrong, but at least he’s aware of the difference. Hux, on the other hand… Hux is single-minded: the end justifies any means for him, and he will commit any number of atrocities if it helps him achieve his goal. That man doesn’t even know what a moral compass is. If I have to choose between Ren and Hux, I’ll choose Ren. At least we have a chance of survival, with him.”

Rey remembers, in startling detail, the look she saw on Kylo’s face when he killed Snoke to save her. She remembers the feeling of fighting alongside him, and it fills her with a tentative hope. So she nods and declares,

“I agree with General Halsey. He won’t betray us, not when he has so much to lose as well. Let him go. Let’s worry about this after Leia’s ceremony.”

Avix looks like he’s about to argue further, but the whine of an engine overhead cuts him off. It appears that Kylo is no longer bothering with keeping his ship in stealth mode, since the Resistance now knows he’s there. Rey feels a twinge of sadness as she watches the small black ship rise and soar away. The crowd follows the ship with their eyes as it shrinks into the sky. It vanishes when it hyper-jumps away. Avix swallows his argument now that it’s a moot point, though he looks as if he’s just tasted something terribly sour.

The Resistance turns back to finish watching Leia’s pyre burn. The silence is tense, almost unbearable. The three Generals and the high command stand in their row by the dais, though the rest of the crowd resumes their seats. Rey stares at the rising flames, trying to ignore the betrayal that radiates from Finn two rows below her, and the accusatory glare Poe has fixed on her. She won’t look at them, but she can feel their eyes like needles in her skin.


	2. Sacred texts

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Resistance scrambles to re-locate after Leia's funeral. Finn demands answers. Then, Rey and Kylo are thrust into an awkward conversation by the Force Bond that keeps butting into their lives.

* * *

The moment Leia’s ceremony is over, Avix insists that the Resistance pack up and leave immediately. It doesn’t take much time- they haven’t been here very long, and though they’ve regained a small portion of their numbers and acquired a few more ships in the weeks since the Battle of Crait, the _Millenium Falcon_ is still the largest ship they have. People crowd onto their designated transports with their paltry belongings while the Resistance’s remaining weaponry and medical supplies are loaded onto the _Falcon’s_ cargo hold. Leia’s pyre is still smoking faintly as the tiny fleet takes off. They’ve already collected most of Leia’s ashes and buried them, but it still hurts to leave her behind, her grave marked but unnamed because they didn’t have time to carve the headstone. Rey resolves to come back to it someday soon, to mark it properly with the respect the General deserves.

The _Millenium Flacon_ now belongs to Chewbacca, with Leia gone, but the wookie prefers his copilot chair over the pilot chair that is rightfully his. He and Rey have agreed to take turns piloting, and they count themselves the dual owners of the ship. It is a comfortable arrangement. Once the Resistance has hyper-jumped away, Chewie takes a break to eat and leaves Rey to keep an eye on the cockpit. She double-checks that the coordinates are entered correctly, then props her feet up on the co-pilot chair. All that’s left is to wait for General Halsey to radio her from the other ship and tell her where the Resistance is going this time.

She loosens the clasp on the back of her dress while she waits. She hasn’t had a chance to change, but at least the dress is relatively comfortable. She puts her hair back as well, looping a couple of bands around it to form a ponytail at the base of her neck. Then she sets her chin in her hand and watches out the front window as the stars zip by, nothing but streaks of light in hyperspace.

She sits in contemplative silence for awhile, thinking of everything and nothing. She is so deep in her own mind that she doesn’t notice when Finn enters, and she starts when he touches her shoulder. She lurches out of her seat, looks up, sees who it is, and smiles. But the smile flees when she notices the look on his face. In his eyes.

“What did I just see back there, Rey?” he asks. His seems less angry than he is confused, and hurt. Why would she let Kylo go? Why did Kylo speak to her like that, why did she return his looks, his tone of voice? Why wouldn’t she let Finn avenge himself on the man who nearly killed him, who _would_ have killed him in cold blood if he’d had the chance?

Rey opens her mouth as if she could explain herself to him, but then closes it. Her guilty silence is all the reply Finn needs. He sighs. He won’t look at her- he just crosses his arms and stares at the control panel, leaning against the pilot chair.

“I knew something must have happened,” he murmurs, “You haven’t been the same since you came back from _The Supremacy_. Now it all makes sense.”

“It’s not what you think,” Rey starts, then winces when she hears how weak her own words sound.

“Then what is it, Rey? Is what he said true? Did _he_ kill Snoke, not you? Did you lie to us all?”

Rey shakes her head. Alright, maybe she didn’t deny the story the First Order put out saying that Rey had killed the former Supreme Leader and overpowered Kylo, but she never said she _did_ do it either. She’d simply said nothing, since she herself didn’t know how to explain it to anyone in a way that would make sense.

“I… I guess it was a lie by omission,” she admits, her cheeks flaming red. “I just… I don’t know. It’s complicated. I wasn’t sure how to tell people about it.”

“What is _‘it’_ , Rey? What really happened? What is going _on_ with you?” Finn growls, finally wheeling to face her. Rey has to struggle not to tear up. She hates to be at odds with Finn like this, but at the same time, she knows he won’t understand. And yet, what choice does she have? If she wants to keep him as a friend, she has to be forthcoming.

“I… I… I learned the truth about Kylo Ren’s past,” she stammers. “On Ahch-To, with Master Luke… I saw an opportunity. Master Luke wasn’t going to help me, but I thought that maybe, if I reached out to the part of Kylo that is still Ben Solo, we might have a chance. I… I know how this must sound to you, but Ben Solo is not the monster everyone thinks he is. I went to him on _The Supremacy_ , let myself get captured. I tried to change his mind, and for a little while, I think I succeeded. It was a risk, I know, putting myself in his hands like that. Snoke was torturing me, I was… I was scared out of my mind,” Rey whispered. A shiver passes through her when she remembers how it felt when Snoke was tearing her apart from the inside.

“And then Snoke told Ben to kill me,” she continues. Her eyes are distant, thoughtful, troubled. “I… I was completely at Snoke’s mercy. We both were. And I thought Ben was going to do it. He was pointing his lightsaber at me, I thought any second I was going to die, that Snoke was going to snuff out the last of the light in Ben and that would be that… but he killed Snoke instead. Snoke had confiscated my lightsaber, it was sitting on the armrest of the throne. Ben used the Force to turn on the saber around, and chopped Snoke in half with it. He saved my life, Finn. He _chose_ to save my life.”

“And after that?” Finn prompts, narrowing his eyes at her.

“From there, well… it’s all a bit of a blur. We both had to fight off Snoke’s guards, or we would have been run through on the spot. I killed four of them, and he killed four of them. I was hoping that he had turned, that he was going fight with me, with _us_ … but when I begged him to stop firing on the fleet, he just…stared. Who knows what was going on in his head… Then he asked me to join him instead. At first I didn’t understand why he would want to stay with the First Order. I think now I understand a little better. He thought at the time that he was doing the right thing. But I had to say no. You _know_ I never would, Finn. My place is here, with all of you. He and I fought over my lightsaber, and then… that’s when it broke. The explosion knocked us both unconscious. I woke first, and I ran. You know the rest.”

“Why didn’t you kill him?” Finn growls. “You must’ve known he would never turn-”

“I won’t make that kind of choice for _anyone_ ,” Rey cuts him off, “Least of all for him. Besides, I know it’s not what Leia would have wanted. She would want me to give Ben a chance, and that’s what I’ve done,” she states.

Finn just sighs and shakes his head ruefully.

“Rey, I know you’re trying to do the right thing, but I doubt that your faith in him will pay off. Maybe there was a good person in him once, but that person is long dead. I watched Ren kill in cold blood over and over and over again, back when I served under him. You can’t save everyone, and you _definitely_ can’t save that monster.”

“You wouldn’t say that if you knew what I knew,” Rey insists softly. Finn just looks at her strangely, as if he doesn’t know her.

“Nothing to be done about it now. I guess we’ll just have to see how it plays out, won’t we?” he says at last, turning towards the doorway to leave. Rey lurches forward and grabs his hand.

“Wait, Finn, please don’t be angry with me. I… you’re all I have. You’re my best friend.”

At this, he seems to soften. He tentatively opens his arms, and the two embrace each other tightly.

“I know you were just doing what you thought was right-” he says at length. And yet, when they separate and he looks down at her, his dark eyes are stern. “-but next time I see that man, don’t try to stop me again. You might be able to forgive him. I can’t.”

With that, Finn turns and goes back to the berths to rejoin Poe and Rose.

Rey sinks into the copilot chair, even more miserable than before. Guilt twists her stomach in knots. She feels horrible that she still hasn’t told Finn the whole truth. He doesn’t know about the Force Bond. Now that Leia is gone, no one does. She has to carry the secret all on her own, with no one to talk to but Ben himself. The thought does not make her feel better. But at the same time, she justifies her actions by reminding herself that if Finn can barely handle the truth about what happened on _The Supremacy_ , he definitely can’t handle the truth about the Force Bond. Not yet, at least. She doubts Poe and Rose will take it much better, when Finn inevitably tells them all about his conversation with Rey.

 _They just need time,_ she reassures herself. She absentmindedly runs her clammy palms up and down the tops of her thighs. _Yes, that’s it. They’ll come to understand in time._

It is a relief when Chewie returns to the cockpit. She flashes him a watery smile as he comes up next to the copilot chair and asks why she’s stolen his seat. She doesn’t reply, but instead reaches out and hugs him around the middle. Chewie wraps his furry arms around her shoulders and purls happily. He never argues with hugs. He holds her for as long as she needs, and she feels safe for a little while. If anyone understands how she feels about Ben Solo, it’s Chewie. After all, Ben must have grown up with Chewbacca. Even when Kylo killed Han, Chewie couldn’t bring himself in all his rage to shoot Kylo in the head. He wouldn’t kill Han’s son. He believes in Ben Solo, just like Rey does.

As they resume their regular seats and go back to monitoring the controls, Rey asks him-

“Hey… I… wanted to ask you. I’ve been curious for a while. What was Ben like when he was little?”

Chewie’s eyes glow with a certain bittersweet tenderness as he launches into a long yarn about the time when a little Ben, at six years old, decided it would be a great idea to smuggle himself onto the Millenium Falcon for one of Han’s journeys. They didn’t discover Ben until they were halfway to Naboo. She laughs along with him, imagining a little boy with silky black hair and Leia’s kind eyes, and a nose and ears that were too big for his face at the time. She can’t help but grin at Chewie’s nostalgic happiness.

 _The poor guy’s lost so much,_ she thinks, _but he’s not bitter. If we were all more like Chewie, the galaxy would be a happier place._

 

…

The Resistance re-settles on a mostly aquatic planet called Tharuss. It is far, far from the center of the Galaxy- way out in Wild Space, almost as isolated as Ahch-To is. They are out beyond the Tammuz Sector, and the nearest civilized planet is Shola (though one could argue that Shola hardly counts as civilized). They are lucky to have made it this far. Thankfully, they were able to stockpile a great deal of fuel in the past few weeks. Their situation is stable, for now.

Tharuss is comprised of a brackish sea which covers almost 95% of the small planet’s surface. It is punctuated, however, with underwater mountains that sometimes thrust their rocky shoulders into the daylight. It reminds Rey of Ahch-To in that way, except that the planet’s life-forms are all under the surface. The barren mountains, having been a popular stronghold for smugglers back in the days of the Republic, have cave complexes carved down into them, with old water-purifying and air-recycling facilities left behind. It only takes the Resistance a week to settle into their new base. In terms of secrecy, it is almost ideal. There are a few inconveniences, like the fact that the entrances to the chambers that serve as launch bays are so small that the _Millennium Falcon_ \- a relatively small ship- can barely fit. If they acquire any larger ships, they won’t be able to hide them. But it will do fine for now.

Avix is paranoid about security as they go about making their new base habitable. Rey is glad that no one knows about her Bond with Kylo and the fact that he can find her anywhere, and vice versa. She doesn’t like to think about what they would do if they knew that she was a walking beacon.

Everyone has to work hard over the course of the first week. They carve out new chambers, widen the existing ones, polish floors and walls, clean up water-damage, repair droids, re-install light systems, re-purpose caves, fix the water-and-air recycling systems, and set up living quarters. Not a day passes when Rey and her friends don’t fall into their cots exhausted at night.

During their second week, they send out several undercover missions. They acquire the necessary materials to make an artificial farm, which will supplement their nearly endless supply of re-hydratable protein and starch rations. They steal some fishing equipment too, since this planet harbors several species of edible aquatic life. They also bring back mundane items like furniture, blankets, and medical supplies to make their new hideout more livable. Rey guiltily uses her Jedi mind-trick to coax supplies out of unwilling merchants, since the Resistance funds are running low. Avix and Halsey regularly praise her for using her powers to further the cause, though she doesn’t like doing it. Even for an ex-scavenger, it feels too dishonest.

All the while, their intelligence scouts scatter themselves around the galaxy, come in and out with the utmost secrecy, never using the same frequency band to communicate, sending messages in code, and always making sure to make at least three separate hyper-space jumps before returning to base. They find out from their intelligence missions that Kylo is true to his word- he says nothing about attending his mother’s funeral, and although tensions between Hux and Kylo are as high as always, there is no sign of a coup imminent. Rey breathes a sigh of relief.

The Resistance has a long way to go if it’s going to build itself back up to fighting strength. The First Order is too strong for them to take on right now, but they are hoping that if Rey gets out on the field and lets it be known that the last Jedi is fighting for the Resistance, more support will come in. It is their best and only plan. So Rey applies herself to becoming stronger and more knowledgeable. She devotes every hour that she can spare from her new duties as General to the study of the ways of the Force, and to her attempts to fix her lightsaber.

She achieves mixed results. The ways of the lightsaber are mysterious to Rey- the ancient technology is like nothing she’s ever seen, and the broken kyber crystal within doesn’t respond to her anymore. So she fashions a practice-saber in the meantime, and works in the training cave every day. This comes to her as easily as breathing. The more she trains with it, the more she realizes that she knows things about fighting with a saber that she never actually learned anywhere. She has a sneaking suspicion that she gleaned these skills from Kylo during their Bond moments. Although this is slightly unsettling, she isn’t above using the knowledge to her advantage. She is determined that, if there comes a time when she must fight him again, she will beat him. She knows very well that she got lucky on Star-killer Base, and if he hadn’t already been weakened by his injuries, he would have overpowered her. She has to be better next time.

She hopes it won’t come to a fight with him, but Rey studies hard just in case. The Jedi Texts hold a great deal of knowledge on the ways of the Force: ways that are neither dark nor light. Ways that are old and powerful. She can feel it when she touches their ancient leather-bound covers, thrumming like the rhythm of a heartbeat. But unfortunately, although she is fluent in many spoken languages, she isn’t great at reading. And the language of these texts is like nothing she’s ever seen. No one else she’s asked can make sense of it either. Alone at night, when she sits up in bed in the dimness of her chambers, she will often hold one of the books in her lap and stare at it, hoping that somehow the letters will re-arrange themselves, or she will be struck with some rush of understanding, or the Force will speak to her through the ancient objects and tell her what she hungers to know. But the books lay, silent and knowing, in her hands, betraying none of their secrets.

It is on one such night, barely a month after the Resistance re-settled, that she sees Kylo again.

She is just about to fall asleep sitting-up with the text clutched in her arms when a familiar pressure swells within her mind. An inaudible humming vibrates through her bones, and then she feels his presence, hears the soft rasp of his breathing. Her heart catches in her throat, but she hopes that if she doesn’t look at him and doesn’t move, he might just go away-

“…I know you’re awake,” he says at length. She sighs, and grudgingly opens her eyes.

He is leaning against a wall with his arms crossed over his broad chest. Wherever he is, it is well-lit, and so he is surprisingly luminous amongst the shadows of Rey’s room.

“That was unnecessary, you know,” Rey growls.

“What was?”

“Crashing Leia’s funeral. It was disrespectful. You ruined the whole thing, you had _no_ place there. You’re lucky you didn’t get shot.”

“I had every place there. She was my mother. Nothing else mattered. You of all people should know that, since _you_ were the one who wanted us to say goodbye to each other so badly,” he retorts. Then he smirks, which is infuriating to Rey. “Besides, I knew you wouldn’t let them shoot me. You’re too sentimental.”

“Maybe I should have let them. Arrogant ass.”

Kylo disregards the insult completely, and instead chooses to look around her. His nonchalance is maddening.

“I think the Bond is getting stronger, despite your efforts to fight it,” he observes. His dark eyes rake up and down, slightly unsettling in their intensity.

“What makes you say that?” Rey growls. She opens up the Jedi text on her knee and pretends to be reading, so she has an excuse to ignore him.

“I can see a little bit of your surroundings now. Just a part of the bed, and the table by your elbow. What about you?”

Rey glances up, and realizes that he is right. She can see a bit of the wall he’s leaning on, the curve of the corridor he’s standing in, and the shine of the polished black floor under his feet. But she just shrugs, and turns back to her text.

“Yeah, I suppose I can see a little now.”

There is a long pause after this, and Rey waits with baited breath for him to speak. She knows he is thinking about what happened in Snoke’s throne room, as she is, and she dreads what he will say to her. But to her surprise, he doesn’t mention it. He just states quietly,

“You can’t really read that book, can you.”

Rey sighs and lets the text fall back against her thigh.

“No. I never was much good at reading- never had the chance to properly learn.”

“Where did you even get your hands on that thing?”

“I…I found the sacred texts in the First Jedi temple, where Master Luke was hiding. I don’t know why, but… I took them. On an impulse.”

“I don’t suppose one can expect much else from a scavenging junk trader,” he says cuttingly. Rey just turns her head and glares at him. He stares right back.

“I didn’t take them because I’m a thief,” she insists. “I don’t like stealing. I took them because… they… they spoke to me. They promised me they could show me the truth. But they _lied_.”

She slams the dusty tome shut and tosses it down on the covers. Her eyes swim with bitter tears of frustration.

Kylo pushes off the wall and takes a few steps towards her. He pulls both black gloves off and shoves them in his belt. His brow furrows as he reaches out to touch the book’s cover. Rey watches with interest. Will his hand pass right through it? Will he disappear if he tries to interact with Rey’s surroundings? They know now that they can touch each other through the Force Bond, but what about objects?

Both of their eyes widen when his fingers press against the book’s cover, as if it is just as present to him as it is to Rey. Slowly, reverently, his picks the tome up and opens it in his hand, thumbing through it to a random page. Suddenly, it occurs to Rey that it might not have been a good idea to let him touch it. What if he steals it? What if the Bond transports the thing all the way across the lightyears and it ends up in his hands rather than hers? What if-

“I’ve never seen characters like these before,” he says, interrupting her thoughts. He turns a brittle page and his eyes rove across the lines of ancient text. His mouth has softened a great deal, and his demeanor is one of distant curiosity. He kunckles the corner of his mouth as he examines the pages in a gesture of absentminded absorbtion.

“…Can you read it?” Rey wonders. As distrustful of him as she is right now, the idea is tempting. She is disappointed when he shakes his head.

“No. However…there are discernible patterns, here… and here… and here, on this page too,” he says. He tilts the book to show her where he’s pointing. His dark eyes are shining with a faint hint of intrigue. “The language isn’t unlike some other dead tongues I’ve seen… Yes, it’s quite similar to the ancient Alder-Espirionic tongue. Given time, and access to a lingual database, I could probably decipher portions of it.”

Rey folds her knees under her and sits up straight, the hint of a hopeful smile on her face.

“So you’ll help me, then? You’ll help me decode the texts?”

Kylo snaps the book closed and carelessly drops it on the bed. Rey’s heart sinks when she sees the eagerness fade from his eyes, and his look grow cold.

“And why would I do something like that?” he sneers.

“Ben, please. Imagine what we could learn from this, together!”

“No, what _you_ could learn,” he corrects. He crosses his arms again and haughtily looks down his nose at her. “ _I_ am already a Master in the use of the Force. I’ve been schooled in both sides, the Dark and the Light. _You_ are the novice. I don’t need these texts, and I don’t need you.”

“These are the _original_ teachings of the Order, before it split into Dark and Light!” Rey insists. “These texts are older than the Jedi and the Sith, they probably hold secrets that neither of us could dream of. But I can’t do it alone.”

“You should have thought of that before you left. Again.”

Kylo turns on his heel and starts to walk away, down whatever corridor he is in. Rey can feel him trying to cut off the connection. He’s done, he doesn’t want to look at her anymore or hear her voice, but Rey decides that she’s not finished with him yet. She throws the covers back and crosses her room in a few strides, snatching for his hand. He starts when he feels her grab it, and turns back with wide eyes. She expects him to tear his fingers from her grasp, but he stands there as if frozen with shock, and stares. His palm is warm and dry, a little calloused from the work of training and fighting. Rey squeezes his hand once, and just like that, the façade is undone. She understands why he needed a mask- his mercurial eyes and the softness of his mouth give everything away. His anger, his bitterness: none of it holds a candle to the warmth she awakens in him. He swallows hard and says quietly-

“Stop this. Let go of me.”

“No,” she immediately retorts. “I won’t give up on you, Ben. I still believe we can make this right, you and I.”

“…Then why? Why did you leave?”

Rey pauses and examines his face. His voice is plaintive as he tells her-

“I killed my master for you. I offered you everything I am. I offered you the entire galaxy, and still you left. How can you say you care, after all that?”

Rey doesn’t know what to say, doesn’t know how to make him understand. She’s not sure she understands it herself. But as his fingers tighten around hers, she senses shadows flashing by within his mind, boiling just beneath the thin border that separates them. She tentatively opens herself to them through the Bond, and suddenly she is plunged into a molten pool of memories that are not hers.

 ...

_Kylo, lying in the cold snow on Starkiller Base, chilled to the bone, swimming in and out of consciousness, faint from blood loss. He doesn’t recall much of the journey out of the forest and to the escape carriers, except that Hux comes to retrieve him, and the pity in the man’s eyes is nearly unbearable. But Hux has reason to pity Kylo, for what Rey did to him doesn’t hold a candle to what Snoke will do to him as punishment for his failure._

_Kylo, suspended for an afternoon in a Bacta tank, having his injuries healed. But he is prematurely pulled out, before the surface abrasions are completely gone. Snoke believes that carrying one’s scars is important, so Kylo is left with his injuries only half-healed. His punishment is to carry the pain of his wounds. Kylo just counts himself lucky that Snoke isn’t going to whip him raw, which was something Snoke has done to him before. Kylo lets the nurse droids bandage him up, then reports directly to Snoke’s throne room. His heart is heavy with dread. Whether he'll be whipped or not, this still promises to be unpleasant._

_A heavy verbal rebuke, punctuated by Force lightning that throws Kylo across the throne room like a ragdoll. He lands on his back ten feet away. The breath rushes right out of him, along with all his will to fight it. The truth of his master’s words are undeniable and crushing. Even after Rey defeated and disfigured him, even after she brought this calamity down on him, he still can’t hate her. Not after what he saw when he was inside her mind, not after what he felt. This, more than the failure itself, is what angers Snoke. Kylo should hate Rey, but he can’t no matter how hard he tries to twist it in his head. She was just defending herself from him, after all: HE is the monster who killed his own father in front of her, then attacked her and nearly killed her friend. He even feels bad for what he’s done to her. Regret is something the Dark side doesn’t feel, but Kylo can’t help it. And because Snoke knows Kylo’s every thought, he sees this irreparable weakness. In the end, all Kylo can do about it is wait until he’s alone, and then take out his rage on that mask that still can’t hide his failure to resist the Light._

_Fear, in the days that follow. Kylo knows that Snoke had apprentices before him, and each was killed when they outlived their usefulness. He’d thought he was powerful enough to avoid that fate, strong enough to please his Master, to be by his side for the rest of his life. To find belonging. But now, Snoke’s disappointment can mean only one thing. The moment Kylo is no longer of use, the moment Snoke finds someone better, it’ll be over for Kylo. There is no redeeming himself from this._

_Rey, presenting an opportunity for him amongst all this fear and confusion. The warmth he feels in her presence is very real. She makes him feel calm like he hasn’t felt in years- she makes him feel clean. Try though he might, he is physically incapable of being angry at her anymore. And as her hatred for him fades away, his hope grows. She made him believe that there can be something else, though what that ‘something’ is, he’s not sure._

_Memories that aren’t his, flooding into his head the moment he touches Rey’s skin across the lightyears. In those moments, he feels it all as she felt it: the barren desert nights that were as cold as the days were hot, the hours of work yielding little profit, the primitive struggle for survival, the weeks when she was lucky to get one meal a day, and all the poignant terror and loneliness, held up only by the delusional, desperate hope that a nonexistent family would one day return for her._

_The knowledge, in that moment when their fingers are touching and where they know each other better than anyone else in the galaxy, that she is just like him. And he can’t let anything happen to her._

_A promise, stronger than any he’s ever made. If Snoke has to die, then Snoke will die. If Kylo has to die in the process of killing Snoke, he gladly will. But he won’t let his master get his claws around Rey, wouldn’t let her suffer the same fate he did. So he waits for her, standing in the bridge of The Supremacy and staring out into space, watching for her arrival. He waits for Rey to come for him, as he knows she will._

_Suppressed panic as Kylo leads Rey into the throne room, his hand on the small of her back, pushing her forward to what could very possibly be her doom. He has no plan- just the intent. He knows he has to kill Snoke, but the ‘how’ of it is a mystery to him. He just kneels there and listens to her cries, aching, feeling every moment of her pain and panic as Snoke tears her apart from the inside. He averts his eyes, because if he watches, the anger will overwhelm him and Snoke will know. He struggles to keep his mind blank, because within his soul he is screaming:_

Just hold on Rey! Please, just wait, just be strong for a little longer, and when the opportunity comes I will free us both!

_The look of shock on Snoke’s face, and the satisfaction Kylo feels as the light drains from his master’s eyes. He vividly remembers this, though out of the life-and-death struggle that follows, he doesn’t recall much else. He remembers losing focus at one point when he sees Rey injured. He remembers that she repays his favor and saves his life right near the end. But most of all, he remembers the silence that follows the fight. For the first time since he was eight, Kylo is alone in his own head. His thoughts are his own. His emotions are his own. In the moment after he killed the last Praetorian guard, he stares at Rey and his mind falls so blessedly still, it takes every ounce of strength in his body not to weep._

_The other repercussions of freedom. It isn’t until later, in the weeks after the Battle of Crait, that Kylo has to deal with them. He is stung by Rey’s refusal to join him. He doesn’t know what to do, after that. He didn’t think that far ahead: he assumed she would be there to show him the way. Now he’s angry and confused and fumbling. There’s a power vacuum within his soul, and the civil war that rages over it threatens to rend him into a million screaming pieces._

_Blame for his suffering, which he assigns to Rey. He killed Snoke for her just as much as for himself, didn’t he?! He offered her the entire galaxy on a platter- she who is nothing, who has no prospects whatsoever! And still he craves her presence, despite his resentment. His desire to have her with him is still just as strong, because without Rey, he still can’t reproduce the sense of warmth and peace he feels when he is with her. Their connection is now the only stable thing he has in his life. With Snoke gone, it is his only solid ground._

_The desire to see her, in the hopes that maybe he can talk it out with her, and put some of the chaos to rest. But it only gets worse as time goes on. Days and then weeks go by without seeing or feeling her, and he wonders if the Force Bond broke when Snoke died. He’s sure he would have known if the link had snapped, but at the same time, the lack of word from her is ominous. He’s grown worried. It gets worse and worse. The tension seems to be building towards the mouth of the volcano, primed to explode-_

_-And then his mother dies._

 ...

Rey gasps like she’s been given and electric shock. She doesn’t want to see the next memory, since she knows what happened all too well, and so she withdraws from Kylo’s mind as if stung. But she simultaneously pulls him closer, wrapping his hand between both of hers. She squeezes it tightly as involuntary tears spring to her eyes and trickle down her cheeks.

“Did… did you just see something? Another vision?” he prompts, more puzzled than anything else. Rey realizes that he doesn’t know about her accidental intrusion.

“I’m s-sorry Ben, I didn’t mean to pry,” she stammers, wiping her eyes on the back of her sleeve before resuming her hold on his hand. “I… I just… I need you to know that I didn’t want to leave you, any more than you wanted me to leave. But… I couldn’t ignore my sense of right and wrong. I can’t give up everything for you.”

“And I can’t give up everything for you,” he replies. His voice is soft with regret. “I can’t leave the First Order now. Hux would just take my place, and if Hux took it over, the galaxy would truly be lost.”

“That’s not true. You could join us. Please, Ben, I know you don’t really want to fight-”

“-I can never go back,” he interrupts. “What I want doesn’t matter. After what I’ve done, I can never go back. You know that.”

“…So where does that leave us?” Rey asks.

“I don’t know. Maybe… maybe it would be best if we _both_ just left.”

“What do you mean?”

“If I deserted the First Order… and you deserted the Resistance. We’d both be fugitives, but we’d also both be free, in a sense. We could go far, far away: somewhere where there's no war.”

Rey inhales sharply as she pictures it: walking away from everything. All the responsibility, all the pressure, the judging looks, the friends who don’t trust her anymore, the peers who respect her but at the same time think she’s a freak, the frustration of having to figure everything out on her own, with no one who understands what it’s like.

But then again, that’s not all true. Finn and Poe might not understand, but that doesn’t stop them from caring about Rey and encouraging her in her Jedi studies. And Rose has gotten into the habit of taking time out of her day to help Rey train, now that her injuries are healed. And Chewie always seeks her out to sit with her at mealtimes. The Wookie refuses to fly the _Falcon_ on solo missions without her. And even if General Avix always treats Rey like she has something to prove, Halsey listens to her and values her opinion.

Slowly, regretfully, Rey shakes her head at Kylo.

“I’m sorry, I can’t run off with you. These people care about me. The Resistance is like the family I never had, and I can’t abandon them.”

“Lucky you,” Kylo snaps. He leans away from her, but Rey tugs him back, refusing to let go of his hand just yet. She growls,

“Wait a second! I’m not finished! Just because neither of us can leave doesn’t mean we still can’t make something work. You said once that you wanted to teach me. And I once told you that I would help you. With this Force Bond thing, we can still do that for each other. We just have to keep it quiet, for now. It’ll be our secret. And who knows what the future will hold? For all we know, everything might change someday soon, and we’ll be glad that we were there for each other, that you had somebody on this side and I had somebody on that side.”

Kylo blinks at her, then scowls.

“You are _painfully_ optimistic. But then again… you may have a point.”

He turns his head and looks out the viewport next to him for a moment. When Kylo looks back at Rey, he is contemplative.

“…Wait for me here,” he says.

“Well it’s not like I’m going anywhere, this is my bedroom!” she snaps.

“Really?” he replies, glancing around her. “How quaint.”

“Why the hell else do you think I’m in here in my pajamas?”

“I don’t pretend to know, Rey. Just... stay put. I’ll be right back.”

Rey tilts her head at him as he turns and strides away in a different direction. His image, and the image of his surroundings, disappears as if he has turned and invisible corner. His footsteps recede into the distance, and she is staring at nothing. But the Bond is still there- there is a hard glow of starlight in her room, streaming in from the viewport of whatever ship Kylo is on. She sighs and sits on the edge of the bed, dragging the blankets around her shoulders. But Kylo is only gone a few minutes before he returns with a pair of rather strange objects in hand. He appears rather suddenly. Again, it's as if he has turned an invisible corner. Rey stands up as he approaches. One of the objects he has is like the pages of the book: almost cloth-like, but brittle, in the shape of a rectangle. The thing in his other hand is long and thin, with a metal tip shaped like a tiny dagger. She watches in fascination as he opens the ancient Jedi text on the bed and sets the small white leaf down next to the first page. He puts the end of the metal-tipped instrument in his mouth for a moment. He sucks on it, then places the instrument on the leaf. A gasp escapes Rey’s lips when thin black lines issue from the end of it. His eyes flick back and forth from the pages of the book to his leaf as he laboriously copies down each character exactly as he sees them.

“What is that?” she wonders, peering down at his work.

“Well I doubt I’ll be able to take the book with me when this connection fades. So I’m copying the-”

“No, no, I mean that bit of cloth and the thingy making the lines.”

Kylo pauses and raises an eyebrow at her.

“Um… this is an ink pen, and parchment. …What, you’ve never seen someone write before?”

“Of course not!” Rey exclaims. “Nobody writes anymore, not when we have holopads!”

“I don’t think this language, whatever it is, will be available in a holopad database. I can’t type it out, and I can’t take the whole book, so I’ll just have to copy this piece down. Give me a second…”

He scribbles out the last line, then sticks the end of the pen in his mouth so he can hold up the book and the parchment side-by-side, tilting them towards the light source so he can check them over. When he is satisfied that the copy is perfect, he sets the book down, folds up the parchment, and slides it inside his doublet.

“That’ll do,” he states, removing the pen from his mouth. He twirls it around his fingers absentmindedly as he tells her, “I’ll give decoding this page a try.”

“You will!? Oh, thank you, Ben! I can’t tell you how much I-”

“Don’t thank me yet,” he interrupts, cutting her enthusiasm short. “There’s no guarantee I’ll succeed. And I’ll want something from you in return.”

“Really? Like what?” Rey wonders, crossing her arms hostilely. All he does is roll his eyes at her.

“Don’t worry, it’s nothing that’ll compromise your precious sense of morals. But that vision you said you had… the one of my future…”

“What of it?” Rey growls. Kylo points the pen at her.

“In exchange for my attempt to decipher your texts, I want you to write down everything you remember about the vision, in detail. I want to know _exactly_ what you saw.”

Rey breathes a sigh of relief.

“Well if that’s all you want, then of course.”

“So we have a deal?”

“That we do.”

A pause follows this. Kylo tilts his head at her, then murmurs-

“I suppose I’ll say goodbye for now. I have places to be and things to do.”

“Isn’t it a bit late to be working?” Rey challenges, glancing at the clock. On Tharuss, it’s nearly midnight. In Galactic standard time, which is the time the First Order no doubt keeps on its ships, it’s the wee hours of the morning. Kylo just glances away, out the viewport again.

“… I don’t sleep much.”

“… Oh. Well… Goodnight anyway, Ben,” she whispers.

“Goodnight, Rey.”

With that, he tucks his pen behind his ear, shoves his hands in his pockets, and strides back down the hall. Rey watches after him until he turns at the end of the hallway and is gone from sight. The familiar swell of pressure drains from her mind, the starlight fades, and the connection is gone.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I made Tharuss up although I did look at a canon map when I figured out the sector and the nearest civilized planet. Unlike some other well-researched fic authors I've read who are well-versed in both canon and Legends, I'm afraid I didn't put in the effort to fit everything into the existing Star Wars universe. I wish I was on @diasterisms ' level, but alas, your humble fic-writer does not have the time or energy to make everything fit together that neatly. If research will take me longer than 20 minutes, I just don't do it. Sorry, not sorry.


	3. The alleyways of memory

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The universe throws a proverbial wrench into Rey's plans, though for better or for worse remains to be seen.

* * *

 

As promised, Kylo doesn’t sleep that night, but not because he has duties to take care of as Supreme Leader. He lied to Rey about that bit- the reality is that he finished the day’s work hours ago. He stays awake because he doesn’t want to think too hard about things, not when his mind is his own worst enemy. He knows that if he lays down in bed, he’ll just stare at the ceiling for hours and drown in his own thoughts. So instead he puts his brain to work.

He was on an errand to the galley when the Force Bond interrupted him. Now he finishes his errand, swiping a platter of the day’s leftover tuber stew from the pot that sits on the counter, cooling. He has to make himself eat, these days- he always forgets because he never has much appetite, and it won’t do for his strength to run out. Not when he has to be constantly vigilant against Hux and his scheming.

Kylo was originally going to take the food back to his chambers, but instead he carries it off to the archives. The massive chamber is deserted at this hour, as most of _The Supremacy’s_ facilities are. But the crew of the ship is accustomed by now to Kylo wandering about in the dead of night, a black-clad wraith who moves like a ghost in their midst. He doesn’t even bother to sneak anymore. He’s been doing it for years now, since before he killed Snoke, so it’s commonplace to glimpse him around the ship when the rest of the galaxy is asleep. He never makes any excuses to the guards, and is never asked to. They gave up trying to inquire after what he’s doing or where he’s going a long time ago. The troopers who stand by the entrance to the archives just salute their Supreme Leader, and open the door for him.

“Good evening, my lord,” says Madame Coralla, the archivist who watches the front check-in desk at night. She has a face like someone who’s just swallowed an entire lemon, but she does her job well enough, so her frosty demeanor can be forgiven.

“Evening, Madame,” Kylo replies. He and the nighttime archivist have a cordial relationship, since he is one of the only people who ever visits at this hour. She never makes him check in, either- he doesn’t like to have his midnight visits on record, so she lets him in on the down-low.

“What will it be tonight, sir?” Coralla wonders, her fingers poised over the display on her desk.

“Lingual database. Dead tongues.”

She raises one eyebrow at his unusual choice- it’s usually the maps, or the records of the Galactic wars, or the historical documents on the ancient Sith, or the small remaining collection of fact-books on the old Jedi Order. Dead languages isn’t something anyone often looks up, let alone him. But she says nothing. She taps a code into the display, which illuminates a path in the floor leading through the maze of pulsing data-stacks.

Kylo follows the lit-up path to the linguistic section, which stops in front of the data-stacks that hold the information on dead languages. He uses the holopad connected to the wall to summon the individual data-stack on every tongue that he thinks resembles the characters in the Jedi texts, or tongues that might share a common root, or tongues that originated in the same area as Ahch-To. One by one he holds his piece of parchment up next to them, comparing the letters. He weeds out things that don’t share similar patterns, which narrows his selection of possible sister-languages down to about twelve. He replaces all the others. With a sigh, he gathers these twelve into a pile and uses the Force to levitate them behind him as he seeks out a quiet workspace.

 With his feet propped up on a drink-table in the corner of the archives, he passes the night in relative peace, studying his section of the Jedi texts. He eats with one hand and works with the other, chewing on the tubers in the stew mechanically. He uses his personal holopad to scan the written page, and then make notes on it. He breaks the characters apart into groups, puts them back together again, re-orders them, compares them to the languages in the databases, and examines their shapes in detail. It's an engaging puzzle- not an unpleasant use of his time, to be sure. It takes him hours just to figure out which of his twelve possible languages share the most similarities in pattern and appearance. It takes him a few more hours to confirm a common root between three of the possibilities, but that doesn’t get him much closer to actually translating the words to Galactic Common, since these dead languages don’t necessarily have direct translations. None of them are the exact same as the Jedi text’s tongue anyway, which means he’ll have to do a lot of guesswork, and then translate each character from scratch.

Kylo re-assures himself that once he figures out the initial few pages and gets most of the alphabet translated, the rest will be easier. He just has to crack the cipher first, and then he and Rey can de-code the texts based on the cipher. He works at it in silence until the wake-up alarm chimes through the ship, signaling the beginning of another day’s work. He surveys his progress as the lights in the archives gradually brighten to the daylight setting. He’s managed to get one or two characters translated into the equivalent of the ‘i’ and ‘e’ vowels of Galactic common. It isn’t much, but it’s a start.

He folds up the parchment and secrets it in the safety of his doublet as he’s leaving. The archive-droids replace the data stacks that he borrowed, filing everything away in their proper places. Madame Coralla is gone when he reaches the front desk. She’s been replaced by the daytime archivist, who greets him with a formal bow. Kylo doesn’t acknowledge the young man’s presence, but sweeps out into the hallway with his chin tilted up haughtily. His face once again settles into a grim, stony frown. He had his hours of privacy, but now it is time to become Supreme Leader again.

…

Rey doesn’t have any time the next day to keep up her end of the deal with Kylo. She’s too busy trying to organize a weapons-and-supplies raid on a nearby First Order base. Avix, who is responsible for the planning of individual operations, is hesitant to let Rey out into the field now that she’s a General. But she insists that, with Leia and Raddus gone, the Resistance needs a field General- someone who they can quite literally follow into battle. She also points out that, with her abilities in the Force, she is most likely operative to succeed in infiltrating the base and lowering the defenses. This is what convinces Avix, though he agrees only reluctantly.

After this, it is her turn to check how the repairs on their fleet are going. The responsibility of overseeing the base itself and the re-building of the Resistance’s forces has fallen to Rey. She enters the launch bay and immediately calls for Poe. His voice rings out from the other end of the bay in reply. He’s been promoted to Commander again, while Rose has made Lieutenant Colonel and Finn has made Colonel. All three of them answer directly to Rey, though with the size of the Resistance right now, their titles don’t actually mean much. They mostly refer to each other by their ranks as a joke. Rey likes to call them her A-team, with the ‘A’ standing for ‘asshole’.

“How’s it going, Captain?” Rey asks, setting her elbows on a stack of boxes next to the broken-down, half-salvaged X-wing Poe is working on. He’s on his back underneath it. He curses as a spurt of oil soaks his red overalls.

“Just fantastic, General,” he replies, shimmying out from under the fighter. The scowl on his face informs Rey that things are anything but fantastic. “This heap of junk has busted lines everywhere, and there’s just not enough hosing to replace it all. I keep having to put in temporary patches and splice bits of hosing in, but they don’t last.”

Rey sighs.

“Yeah, I know how that feels. The Falcon isn’t doing great either.”

“Is that ship _ever_ fully functional, though?”

“No,” Rey chuckles, “But she’s also been better. Don’t worry about it, though- we’re about to fix all of that.”

Poe’s face brightens as he catches onto the implications of her words.

“Oh yeah? What makes you say that?”

“Avix is sending me and a small team on a supplies and weapons raid. We’re gonna infiltrate a First Order base in the Utapua system. Will you come? We’ll need a good getaway pilot!”

“You’re a pretty good pilot yourself, Rey,” Poe insists. “You sure you need little old me?”

Rey laughs and punches him in the arm.

“Of course I do, I’m not even close to as good as you!”

“One of these days we’ll have to test that,” he jokes. “Till then, when are we leaving?”

“Tomorrow morning, 04:00 hours.”

“That early?! You’re killing me!”

“Suck it up, fly-boy!”

Laughing, the pair of them part. Poe has to get back to work on his X-wing to get it ready in time, and Rey has to check on the rest of the fleet’s progress.

…

Later that day, when she takes her short and harried lunch break, she decides on an impulse that she’s taking it outside. She’s used to open spaces- the underground chambers are strangling to her. They have some transparisteel windows, but the windows only look out to the dim, rocky underwater landscape that surrounds their submerged mountain base. The light they let in is faint and tinged with blue darkness even in broad day, while at night they form pitch-black windows into the depths of fear itself.

Rey climbs up to the hidden hatch that leads out to the top of the mountain peak. The greedy wind snatches at her clothes as she pushes the hatch open. She hauls herself and her food out onto the ledge between the mountain’s twin peaks. It is deserted and blessedly quiet here, if a bit cold. The wind whistles stridently in the gap between the peaks. Rey doesn’t mind- the harsh gusts, though they are cooler and wetter than what she’s used to, remind her of Jakku.

She hangs her legs off the side of the ledge and balances her ration-box on her thighs. It’s not exactly like the meditation Luke taught her (she was never very good at keeping that serene, straight-backed lotus pose). But it’s a kind of meditation all the same, to sit up here where the salty breeze licks her through her clothes and the sun warms the back of her neck. Even the daylight here is touched blue, she reflects. The sun in this system is so hot and distant that it burns the color of ice, a tiny dot amongst all of that crystalline light. From the cool greyish hue of the mountain’s stone foundations, to the severe azure of the sky, to the brooding darkness of the vast ocean that churns beneath her dangling feet: everything is sharp and clear and blue. It is arguably just as harsh as Jakku, but in a different way. A cold way. A way that is rich with its own unique dangers. This blue seems hostile to Rey, and although it is certainly novel for her, she can’t take pleasure in it.

Takodana, though: Takodana is like something from a dream. A leafy carpet of emerald, air that spills over with dewy life in each breath, a lake of the purest turquoise that glints with shards of yellow-white but still felt so soft and warm when she trailed her fingers in it. There is blue there too, but the blue is tempered by the gentle balminess of the green around it. Rey was too busy running for her life at the time, but with the vision of hindsight, she can re-examine her memory of the place and linger on its lush details- the moss and the grass sinking beneath her boots with each step, the shrubs smacking against her legs, the purity of the air she sucked in with each breath. She hopes she can eventually go back there and appreciate it in full.

 _Yes,_ she thinks, _if ever this war ends and I can choose where to spend my days, I would choose a place like that._

She decides, sitting on the shoulders of that mountain, that her favorite color is green. It doesn’t matter what shade- she loves green for all its rarity and promise of life.

She eats with her usual two-handed gusto, but her eyes dart upward at every opportunity, always on the lookout for avians and the like that she can snatch out of the sky and give to the kitchens. Unfortunately, nothing of the kind glides by, so it seems that tonight’s dinner will be fish-protein from the nets. Again. One thing does catch her eye, thought. A few hundred feet out into the water, a massive dark shape swims up close to the surface and circles once before diving again- like it was looking for something. She shivers to think about what kinds of creatures hide in the blackness below the waves. There is very little information to be had about what, exactly, inhabits the waters of this planet. It’s so remote, she doubts anyone has bothered to explore and catalogue the place’s life-forms.

When Rey is finished eating, she draws back from the ledge a little and checks the miniature holocron on her wrist. She has about twenty minutes left before she’ll be missed, so she resolves that she’ll try and _really_ meditate for a bit. She sets an alarm so that she won’t zone out and miss her next appointment, then folds her legs. Her wrists drape over her knees as her eyes slip closed. She is relatively good at taking the position and regulating her breath- that much, she can thank Jakku for. Controlled breathing is important if one wants to survive during a dust storm there. Physically, her body is purified and ready to enter the state of trance that a Jedi seeks while meditating. But mentally, she can never seem to reach the peace that the Jedi prize.

There is a reason she can never get there. It became apparent on Ahch-To, and it’s only gotten worse as she attempts to carry out her own training independently. It is a fact that’s so inescapable that she can’t even be bitter about it anymore. And the fact is, the image and idea of Kylo Ren draws her thoughts like a lodestone when she meditates.

When she is cleansing her mind in search of a trance, the memories of his face and voice are the last things to go- the things she can never truly rid herself of. Instead, her mind orbits around the memories with a frantic sort of energy that quite contradicts the idea of inner peace. Without her other thoughts to keep her away from Kylo, the idea of him ensnares her attention and draws her in with relentless magnetism.

Perhaps it is because, where he once embodied the Dark Side of the Force in her imagination, he now embodies something else that she is all too familiar with. He embodies conflict. The image of his face inevitably makes her wonder what would happen if she opened herself to the ugly part of her own heart. It is the part of her that hates Unkar Plutt for all the beatings and the abuse and the use of her body in ways that she shudders to remember, ways that destroyed her innocence and forever plagued her with nightmares. It is the part of her that wishes death upon him for that. It is the part of her that deceived herself for so long as she waited on Jakku for a family that didn’t exist, didn’t want or need or love her. It is the part that forced her to remain in that desert hell in slavery, to deny herself the freedom of truth that she knew in her bones. It is the part of her that goes straight for the kill when she fights, the part of her that revels in the deadly hum of a lightsaber in her hands. The dark part of her.

She fights this part of herself on a daily basis, because she knows that this painful, throbbing hole in her soul is the same one that Ben Solo plummeted into when he fell to the darkness. She won’t let it sink its claws into her the way it had into him. She must be an example to him of how to resist, how to come back from the brink of desperation and heartbreak. But that doesn’t stop her from wondering: what if things had been different?

What if the broken pieces of Ben’s family had somehow stayed together in the end? What if Master Luke had thrown his lightsaber away in that moment of fear rather than igniting it, and Ben had never been betrayed? What if he had somehow continued the fight for his soul and he was still on the path of the Jedi? And furthermore… what if Rey herself had succumbed to the whisperings of Snoke, which had begun their workings on her the moment her powers awakened and he learned of her existence? What if he had found her when she was still a child, raised her as he had raised Kylo, groomed her into a queen of shadow?

She can just picture herself standing on a battlefield, glorious and terrifying in battle regalia the color of blood and onyx. She can almost feel the weight of the saber in her hand, which glows an angry scarlet. The bitterness would flow through her, the fear which led to anger, which led to hate, which led to suffering: suffering at Snoke’s hands, but suffering that she thinks, in her twisted and tortured mind, gives her strength. She would stand as alone as she had ever been, surrounded by underlings and disciples and the might of an entire army, but always alone in the end. The abandonment, the betrayal of the family who was supposed to love her, the glares and mutters and the word ‘freak’ whispered behind closed doors- they would become her fuel, and she would use it to burn the galaxy to astral dust.

She knows, with a sense of relief, that she will never become this beautiful and terrible specter of death. She _does_ have a family now, a family she made for herself. She has people who love her, people who will cry for her and fight for her and protect her. They can never stop her from being angry and lonely and bitter. And yet, because of them, she will never stop caring either. Her ability to care and love, even after all her suffering, is where her strength comes from. She will care until the day she dies. She will care and love and sacrifice until it destroys her, until it wears her down to her bones. She will care because it is all she has to give to this uncaring universe, and by god she will give it.

When she thinks of Kylo, of the looks he flashes her, the tiny flickers of unspoken words on his soft lips, the gentle touches… she knows that he cares too. He cares about _something,_ even if he pretends not to. That is why Kylo will never be a true Sith, just as Rey’s past pain will never let her be a true Jedi.

 _So what are we, then?_ She wonders. _Me, the creature of light who still carries darkness within her, and him, the creature of darkness who still carries light within him. Are we opposites? Are we the same? Are we both, are we neither?_

The answer does not come to her in the rhythmic sound of the crashing waves, or the keening wind. She will not reach into the Force bond- she does not wish to complicate her own thoughts, or his, by butting into his mind.

When all of this pondering starts giving her a headache, she automatically falls back on examining her memories of Kylo. Flashes come back to her, odd things that stood out in one or the other of her six senses at the time. Her own shock upon the first time seeing his face, that hair like silk and the pouting lips of a young boy, but eyes so ancient that she could lose herself in them as one loses themselves in eternity. She wasn’t expecting that, when he removed his helmet for her on Starkiller Base. Then there is the sting of their minds colliding, his reluctance to push harder than he has to, his instinctive dislike of the idea of hurting her, which lets her worm past him and peer beyond, at all the pain and terror and fear... The look on his face as Han Solo’s body plummets into the mist below the catwalk: a look of something akin to bewilderment, to the numbness that precedes cataclysmic pain. And then, in the forests of the dying planet, she remembers how his lips part slightly with awe when the Skywalker lightsaber flies right past him into her hand. The intricacy of their dance, the savage pleasure she takes in it, between the terror and the rage. The push and pull of their bodies locked in that simple, pure action of combat. She will never know if she would have killed him that night in the snow, when he fell with his face slashed nearly in half, bleeding from four different places. They may never find out, since the planet split them apart before she ever got the chance.

She is glad she didn’t, because after that there is the slow dawning of understanding. Her surprise when she realizes that he understands _her_. There is the feeling that is almost like guilt as she realizes that there is more to this story than she initially thought. It occurs to her that perhaps his seemingly inherent evil is _not_ a choice he made. Her utter and all-consuming rage when she learns what Luke did to him. There is the comfort of turning to another living being who, in those moments few moments, understands her pain and confusion better than anyone in the galaxy. A hand reaching out. Those moments when their skin came in contact, warm calluses pressed together… she has not met its equal. She has never felt more in tune with the Force than when she and Kylo touched each other across lightyears and were shown visions of things that were, things that have yet to come.

There is the realization that she already _knows_ where he is- she does not have to hail him to ask for coordinates. Then Chewbacca’s quiet assent when she asks him to come with her, to take her there. His no-questions attitude, his immediate and willing belief that Ben Solo might still be saved. The _thing_ Kylo does with his mouth when he sees her in that transport pod: not quite a smile, not a smirk. A knowing look. The private moments in the elevator, when she cannot stop glancing at his lips despite the weight of their words, when the nearness of him is so tempting. The surprising gentleness as his hand drops to the small of her back and leads her forward. She recalls that he was resolved, even in that moment, that he would save her from Snoke at any cost. She saw this in _his_ memories.

Her brain glosses over memory of the things the former Supreme Leader put her through, but with the clarity of hindsight, she is touched by Kylo’s fortitude in waiting it out, poising himself for any chance to strike-

The heat, the clash, the fire, the noise, the feeling of someone fighting at her back where no one has ever fought before. She has never _trusted_ anyone to watch her back before. But she trusts him enough to grab him by the thigh and use his backward momentum to propel her own kick, and oh, the _poetry_ of fighting with him… In those moments the two of them are one and the same- two pieces of the same weapon, fighting in perfect sync. The destruction they wreak is glorious.

But the worst is yet to come.

Rey can’t bear to think about what follows- the pleading in his eyes, his sudden shout for her to _let go,_ his palpable fear at the idea of her leaving him again. But the hand he extends to her is swathed in black, closed off in leather, and not Ben’s. It is Kylo’s. And so however much she wants to accept it, she cannot. She breaks his heart instead, runs away again, runs away with her own guilt, back to Chewbacca where she buries her face in his furry shoulder and cries before they head to Crait. Because leaving has hurt her just as much as it hurt him, if not more.

At last… at long last, in a place where there should be anger, he only kneels in an empty command room and looks up at her as if he is watching the last of the light flee from his life. All desperation and hopelessness and heartbreak is there in the dark glass of his eyes.

But little does he know, she is waiting around the corner for the day when they come to understand what nebulous destiny the Force has laid out for them. She is not gone. She is waiting.

 _I am here, Ben._ She thinks out, to the universe as a whole. _When you are ready to walk this path with me, I am here._

_..._

Rey descends into the base to finish her work for that day. She feels happy, refreshed. Her body buzzes in the aftermath of her meditation, like the after-image of a bright light burned into a person’s vision after it switches off. It is good to commune with the Cosmic Force this way. She always feels at home when she listens to the rhythms of the universe around her, when she feels the currents of energy and recognizes how she perfectly fits into her place in those currents. She feels belonging whenever she enters that headspace, and in the aftermath, her mood soars.

But as she is walking down the narrow entrance hallway, she senses something nearby in the Living Force. It is neither dark nor light. It is twisting, it is hungry, it is convulsing just a few yards away from her, a few feet, a few inches-

She pauses in the hallway next to one of the transparisteel windows, reaching for her blaster and looking around her warily. There is no one here. The Resistances resides below her, their voices are far, far away. Is her sixth sense confused? No, she doesn’t _get_ confused. There is a strong energy signature nearby, and it is so, so close-

The next few moments are so warped with howling chaos that she cannot make sense of it until later in life, when she looks back on it. At the time, thought seems to flee from her head. She glimpses movement in the shadowy waters outside the window, which is just by her left elbow. There is a colossal _crash_ as something barrels into the wall from the outside, as if the ocean has revolted against its new inhabitants. The transparisteel holds against the first impact, but the stone frame around it does not. Rey rears backward, her eyes widening as cracks burst into existence all around the wall.

The creature’s dark shape rears back. The second impact does it.

The only reason Rey isn’t killed on the spot when the creature breaks in is that she sees it coming a split second ahead of time, and throws herself aside. The transparisteel pane hits the opposite wall- the stone crumbles- icy water rushes in around the slithering, reptilian body, knocking Rey off her feet. The water courses downwards over the floor as breach alarms screech to life. The breath jolts out of her lungs as she loses her footing and hits the floor. Looking down the hall, she sees the bulkhead door jam and water start pouring beyond into the rest of the base. Her hand, of its own volition, shoots out. The door squeals, but slams closed under her guidance. The rest of the base is safe from flooding- now she has to save herself from the creature.

She never gets the chance to look at the thing. As she’s shoving herself to her feet, the cold water lashing her skin like so many shards of ice, a pair of pincers at the end of tentacles lash out and snap at her abdomen, trying to tear her entrails out. Rey shrieks as the creature rips a hole in her side, just missing her lungs by inches. Ribs _crunch_ as it gets ahold of her and draws her towards it, and there are teeth filling her vision- not neat rows of teeth, but a chaotic jumble of black barbs that jut from pulsing flesh, as if its head has been turned inside out. Among the teeth, an eye. No, not an eye- a center, a center of nothingness like a tiny black hole, and the Force is leaving her body, torn away and falling, falling, falling into the creature’s bottomless hunger-

For a few moments Rey is paralyzed, her eyes locked onto the hole that is sucking her life force dry, but then something rises up inside her that screams- _Fight, Jedi! Survive!_

A power that is not hers surges into her limbs, a power born of her fear and panic and agony. One boot thrusts out and plants against the creature’s jaw, to stop it from dragging her into its luminous mouth. The animal’s ululating warble fills the hallway, occasionally interrupted by distant, muffled shouting down the hall. The creature thrashes in confusion, tugs on her harder, drinks in her pained cries as its pinchers grind her broken rips and tear her flesh. But it cannot consume the power within her now, because the power is not light, not even a pure darkness, but something else, something grey like twilight shadows- she latches onto it in desperation. Rey’s wits gather around it- her free hand snatches the blaster from her belt, working it free of the tentacle that squeezes her waist. When she shoots into the creature’s mouth, its grip loosens and its warble peaks into a nerve-grinding shriek of agony. Its lets go.

By some miracle, the girl finds her feet on the ground again. While she still has strength to stand, she shoots out a hand and plants it on the thing’s eyeless forehead. Its slimy flesh convulses away from her, but too late. A scream of rage and pain fills the air- it takes Rey a moment to realize that the sound comes from her. That rage charges through her like an electric shock, races down the pathway of her arm into her fingertips, then into the creature. Its cells burst instantly, the shockwave explodes outwards from Rey and rends the thing to pieces. Its death is so rapid, it doesn’t have time to cry out or thrash in its death throes. Slime splatters- on the walls, on her, into the water that is sliding in through the hole which the creature’s worm-like body only partially blocks.

The girl doesn’t get to appraise her work, because the surge of foreign power is leaving her body as quickly as it came, as if it is being torn from her against its own will. Blackness encroaches on her vision- she tries to take a step backwards towards the bulkhead door, where she hears voices, but she slips on the bloody slime. Her back hits the cold water with a _smack,_ and beyond that she knows no more.

… 

Finn’s face- disapproving.

 _That was the Dark Side of the Force, Rey,_ he states. He doesn’t sound angry, but more… disappointed. Disappointed in her.

_I’m sorry, I had to- I would have died!_

_Then maybe you should have died,_ says Finn’s voice-

_Rey-_

_Rey-_

No, that’s not Finn’s voice anymore, that’s a different voice.

_Rey please, Rey…_

She’s been crying in her sleep. There are tears soaking the pillow, she can smell them more than she can feel them- the tang of salt. She is devastated that it’s not Finn who’s trying to wake her up. She wants to see him smile at her, she wants to hear tender words from him that will ease the anxiety of what she thinks she heard. _Do you really hate me?_ She wants to scream, _Please, you are the family I finally found, my best friend, my first friend…_

_Rey…_

_Rey…_

“REY!”

The girl starts awake. The voice that barked her name seems to echo within the confines of her aching skull. She is lying in bed on her side, doused in sweat- she tries to open her eyes- she can’t- they are glued almost shut by a bleary crust. When she reaches up to rub it away, a pair of hands take her wrists and moves her arms aside. Then she feels the soothing coolness of a damp rag, gently working the crumbs out of her eyelashes. She doesn’t realize how very feverish and dry her skin is until the water touches it. She shivers involuntarily as the hands finish their work and then finally retract. Her eyes flicker open.

She is less surprised to see Kylo peering back at her than she is annoyed. It must have shown on her face, or echoed through the Bond, because he flinches as if stung.

“It’s you,” she whispers.

“Your powers of observation are astounding,” he quips. Rey wants to get mad and growl back, but she can’t seem to summon up the energy or the will.

“What are you doing here?” she sighs.

“…You were having a nightmare. The Force saw fit to connect us again. But I figured you wouldn’t appreciate me intruding on your mind, so the only way to snap you out of it was to yell until you woke up.”

Rey grunts her tired assent. Internally, she is surprised at his consideration, but she doesn’t let him know that. She is about to try and sit up in bed when Kylo silently urges her through the Bond-

_Don’t try to move. It’ll hurt._

She appreciates the warning, but she ignores him. She’s no stranger to pain. With a soft moan she gets her elbow underneath her and shoves herself upright, scooting backwards until her back hits the headboard of her bed. The injury in her side throbs, which makes her grit her teeth and hiss to keep from crying out.

“You were attacked,” Kylo supplies before she gets the chance to ask. She glances peevishly in his direction. He is sitting at a writing desk of some sort, in a room that is brightly lit from one side but shadowed on the other. The contrasting light casts half of his face into obscurity. Her own bedroom is dim- it must be evening. She has been left alone for the moment.

“I gathered that much,” she growls. “But by _what?_ That thing was…”

“…Odd. I’ve never seen or heard of its like before,” he finishes after she trails off.

Rey shivers. Her arms warp around herself, and she feels a thick pad of bandages covering her left side, from her hip all the way up to her breast. The cracked ribs ache with every breath she takes.

“What was it… doing to me?”

“…I don’t know. All I have to go by is your memory of it, which is fragmented at best. But from what I observed, it seemed to be feeding on the Living Force in your body. It sensed you through the walls, broke through from the outside, and tried to consume you. It almost succeeded.”

“Then… was… was that _you_?” Rey asks, remembering how the creature’s cells had imploded when she touched it, how half of its body had been torn to shreds before her. “When I blew it up… was that you?”

Kylo shifts in his seat, his eyes darting away.

“…I helped a bit.”

Rey stares at him in horror. She doesn’t know how to rend things apart like that. It’s knowledge she never learned, and she knows for a fact that such a skill could only come from the Darkside.

“Ben, that… that was barbaric! How could you make me do such a-”

“-I didn’t _make_ you do anything,” he interrupts, his voice barely controlled. He won’t meet her eyes- he just stares at the wall over her shoulder. “You were about to die. I offered up the knowledge, and a share of my own power to defend yourself with. You were the one who seized it. Neither of us had time to think about it. It… it was all I could do.”

Rey pauses as she digests his words, and the unspoken currents that rush beneath them.

_I felt your pain. I felt your terror, as if it were all my own. You were going to die and I couldn’t let it happen, because… I care more than I’ll ever admit to you. I had to do something._

Rey makes a conscious effort to dispel her own anger. She blows her breath out from between parted lips, and looks at the ceiling above her. Her arms wrap tighter around herself.

“…I’m sorry I snapped at you, Ben. Thank you for your help.”

“…You’re welcome to it,” he supplies, at length.

Rey absentmindedly runs her hand up and down the layers of bandages that cover her torso. It hurts every time she inhales, and she is perpetually short of breath because of it. Her head is less swimming than it is _sinking._ Kylo’s eyes flick back to her, since she’s no longer looking at him. Evidently he feels some of her confusion about the injury, because he informs her-

“… It took a chunk out of your side, broke a couple ribs, but didn’t harm any of your vital organs, thank the stars. I doubt your ragtag Resistance could have saved you if you were mortally wounded,” he sniffs. It’s become an unspoken truth between them that neither wants the other’s death, and she knows that beneath the feigned disdain, Kylo is thankful that she’s okay. “The real trouble was the infection.”

“Infection? What infection?”

He glances at her with one eyebrow raised, as if she should have inferred this by now.

“You’ve been down for four day-cycles with a fever. They must have put you in an induced sleep to get you through it, since I wasn’t able to contact you the whole time.You’re lucky you didn’t die of sepsis, but since you’ve woken up, I guess one can assume that your Rebel pals finally got the sickness under control.”

“That explains the headache and the sweat,” Rey mumbles, moving a knotted lock of hair out of her face. It occurs to her that she must look like a nightmare after four days, and the color rises to her face. She pauses when she realizes this, and wonders why she cares if she looks terrible or not. She’s never really been self-conscious, being the only human female in Nima Outpost for most of her life. She had nothing to measure her own appearance by, and thus she never learned the habit of comparing herself to other women and thus becoming conscious of her own appearance. So why does it bother her now?

Perhaps he can feel some echo of this through their Bond, or maybe he reads it on her face, or maybe he just has really good timing. But Kylo evidently senses her discomfort about her appearance. His stare is intense as always, but also soft around the edges in a way that is atypical of him. He says quietly,

“By the way… I didn’t get to tell you this earlier, but I thought you looked lovely.”

  Rey’s brow furrows in confusion.

“Lovel- wha… when?”

“At my mother’s funeral. When you wore that dress. You looked nice: like you belonged there.”

Now Rey _really_ blushes hard. She crosses her arms and looks away, but she can feel the tilt of his little half-smirk behind her. Evidently he decides to have mercy, because the pressure recedes from her head as the connection fades. The Bond slinks into its little corner in the back of her mind, and the last thing she hears is Kylo’s gravelly voice whispering-

“Sleep well, Rey. And take care.”


	4. The wasted years

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Kylo makes, like, 8 mistakes in a row. What's new. TW: RAPE AND SEXUAL ABUSE. If you want to skip the one triggering part, you wanna gloss over the second large block of italics in this chapter, which starts right after "Without warning, Kylo is plunged into a horrifically detailed recollection of one particular encounter".

* * *

 

Love, Poe Dameron thinks, is a funny thing.

It can make you angry, or it can make you nervous, or it can make your head feel lighter than helium. He’s been in and out of love a few times, though he doubts he’ll ever settle down. His friends are the only lifelong companions he needs, and he can always satisfy his other needs with the occasional fling. He recognizes the budding love in Rose and Finn, and though he can’t say he isn’t a bit jealous of Rose, he _is_ glad they’ve found such a pure and happy place in each others’ hearts. In these times of darkness, everyone needs something like that.

Rey, though: she puzzles him. Something -or some _one,_ more likely- is on her mind almost constantly. He can tell by the way her eyes go all fuzzy and distant whenever there is a lapse in conversation. The five of them are all sitting in her room in the evening after dinner, keeping her company. They are all glad to see Rey on the mend, and she grins at her friends. But sometimes she has to be prompted to speak, at which point she’ll snap out of her trance and she’ll look confused, like her mind was somewhere else. The fever really did a number on her, so Poe supposes he could attribute her lack of attention to that, but that doesn’t explain why a hint of pink occasionally rises to her cheeks every once in awhile as some private thought occurs to her.

Poe glances around the room. Finn is sitting on the bed next to Rey and chattering away happily- the girl is only half-listening, but the sound of his laugh brings a smile to her face. Rose is on the other side of the bed with BB-8 rolling around her feet. There is a sly, knowing half-smirk on her face, and Poe gets the sense that Rose is sensing the same thing about Rey that he is. Poe doesn’t pretend to know the female mind, but he will always take tips off of other women when it comes to reading each other. Rose’s smirk is all the confirmation he needs.

Their scrappy Jedi friend has a crush.

He considers pressing her about it, but he doesn’t like the look of the bags under her eyes or the sweat dotting her forehead. So he resolves that he’ll ask her later when she’s better. In fact, he decides as the holochron ticks towards lights-out that it’s time everyone left her to rest. He stands up and claps his hands together.

“Alright guys, come on. It’s time to let the General sleep, eh? We’ll need her back in the field soon enough!”

“Wait, one more question!” Rey says as everyone gets to their feet. “I almost forgot. But the raid- what happened there? I was supposed to lead it, did it get canceled?”

Finn grins at Rey.

“Actually, Rose volunteered to take your place. She was brilliant- got in and out like a ghost. We’ve got schematics, patrol schedules, everything except entry codes, but we’ll be able to get around that if you help us. We’ve just been waiting for you to get better, and then we’ll clean the place out!”

Rey smiles back and turns to Rose. The two girls embrace tightly, and then Rose surprises Rey by kissing her on the cheek affectionately.

“What would I do without you guys?” the Jedi sighs. BB-8 chirps,

_Probably cry._

They all laugh, loud and long.

  ...

Once her friends have left to take care of the various pieces of work that have cropped up in her absence, Rey pulls her holopad out and resumes typing. Even amongst all the stuff she’s had to catch up on, she hasn’t forgotten her promise to Kylo. She’s trying to summarize what she saw and felt in her vision, so he can read it next time she sees him.

But the words are coming slow- she’s never been much of a poet. She scowls at the few lines that she’s written out so far. She could be much more descriptive in Huttese or Shyriiwook, but Kylo knows neither of those languages. He is fluent in a staggering three tongues, one of which is Galactic common and one of which is Alderaanian, which no one but Leia spoke anymore anyway. He can read and write a bunch of other languages, but most of them are dead, and his interest in them is historical and academic rather than practical. Few of the tongues he studies are from non-humanoid civilizations.

 _All that intelligence and education, and he uses it to study old burnt-out history shit. Stupid human-supremacist, classist bastard,_ she thinks. But then she pauses and blinks at herself.

_Wait… how do I know what languages he speaks? He’s only ever spoken Galactic Common to me._

Rey sighs in exasperation. She probably picked that knowledge up off the Force Bond too. It alarms her sometimes, how much she gleans from him without meaning to. How much do they accidentally skim from each others’ minds on a daily basis? Hell, she’s already had multiple people comment on how similar her fighting style is to Kylo’s. Finn sometimes gets scared when he spars with her, because he sees Kylo bleeding through in the way she wields her practice-saber. It frightens even her, sometimes. But what can she do? Until the Jedi texts are translated, Kylo is her greatest wealth of knowledge on the Force.

 _Maybe I should try using a different kind of weapon than a saber,_ she thinks. She could always go back to her staff. But her staff just isn’t the same as a lightsaber- she can’t deflect blaster bolts with it, and it doesn’t move like a plasma blade. Lightsabers are so fluid and light; the only weight is the handle itself. She simply can’t move as fast with a staff as she can with a lightsaber. Even her practice-saber is better than the staff in terms of weight and balance, and she’s already gotten so skilled with it.

As Rey is contemplating this, the familiar pressure swells in her mind. She and Kylo look up at each other at the same time. Kylo’s eyes widen. There is a startled beep from something in the room with him, until he scrambles and hits a switch somewhere. Then he turns over his shoulder, extends a hand, and there is a metallic _slam_ as a door closes. Rey freezes and they both listen for a second. She doesn’t relax until he does.

“ _Stars,_ Rey, you have to be more careful before you contact me! The door was wide open and the med-droid saw you! I’ll have to wipe its memory now!” he exclaims as he turns and glares at her. She returns the glower.

“I can’t help when the Force does this, I don’t control it!”

“Well we need to learn to, if we want to keep the Bond a secret. This is the second time we’ve been discovered.”

Rey flinches as she remembers the anger in Luke’s voice when he found the pair of them on Ahch-To. Kylo notices her flinch, and his eyes narrow.

“Skywalker didn’t… do anything to you, did he? When he saw you with me?”

“No, of course not,” she rushes to assure him. And suddenly she can picture Kylo sitting in his chambers on _The Supremacy,_ hand still extended, eyes wide and frozen with fear, staring at the place where she had been just seconds ago, and terrified that Luke would attack her like he’d attacked Kylo so long ago.

She shakes her head once to get the image out of her head, annoyed that she would think of something like that. She always gets these odd flashes of Kylo here and there, at the most inconvenient moments.

“You said there’s a med-droid there with you? Did you hurt yourself or something?” she asks, partly out of mild concern and partly to change the subject. Kylo waves it away.

“Nothing but a graze.”

“How’d it happen?”

“Skirmish on Kashyyyk,” he grunts.

Rey smirks.

“I heard that the Wookies are still stirring up trouble. I’m surprised you got away with just a scratch. Anybody get their limbs ripped off?”

Ben just rolls his eyes at her, crossing his arms over his obscenely broad chest.

“I didn’t expect anything less than the stiffest resistance. We came prepared. And in case you were wondering, the sector is firmly under our control now."

“Did you lead the charge yourself? Is that how you got shot?”

“ _Grazed,”_ he corrected. “And yes, I was personally overseeing the battle.”

“I’m surprised they let you do that, now that you’re the top dog,” Rey comments, turning back to her holopad and idly tapping out a few more words.

“Yes, well, I have to wade through a whole sea of objections every time I try to personally lead an attack,” Kylo growls. “But old habits die hard. Unlike Hux, I don’t treat war as a spectator sport.”

“Do I detect a hint of resentment, Supreme Leader?” Rey teases.

Kylo flicks his eyes to her and presses his lips into a thin line. She can practically hear him thinking,

_Kriff, I’ve said too much again. How does she always get me to spill my guts like this?_

The girl just shakes her head ruefully and taps out a few more words.

As if to deflect from his own discomfort, Kylo asks-

“What are you writing?”

“I’m _trying_ to write out that summary I promised you. But I’ll admit, I’m not much of a poet.”

He watches her for a moment, then hesitantly supplies-

“Well, I’m here now, and I have a few minutes. Why don’t you just tell me about it.”

“I’m… not great with words,” she stammers, her fingers pausing over the holopad. She backspaces two lines, but she can’t think of what to type in their stead. Kylo just snorts ruefully.

“That makes two of us.”

Rey can’t help but smile when she realizes what he must be thinking of. _You’re nothing... But not to me._ What a back-handed compliment! She knew what he meant at the time, of course- he was just trying to say that her background didn’t matter to him. That no matter how much he postured and pretended, he thought of her as an equal. The only catch is, he’d had no idea how to properly articulate the sentiment, and it had come out more like an insult than anything else.

She had an idea of how that felt, looking at her clumsy words across the holopad. Suddenly, she startles Kylo by rolling her eyes and huffing peevishly.

“I mean,” she mutters, “We can always take the easy way out and share the memory through the stupid Force-Bond. But let’s not make that into a habit, okay?”

Kylo nods in agreement, and she thinks she spots the hint of a smile playing at the corner of his mouth. A real smile- not a sneer. She wishes it would come all the way out, more out of curiosity than anything else, but it’s gone the next moment.

His gloves are already off, so he tentatively offers her a hand. She pauses for a moment, then takes it. This time, thankfully, there are no sudden visions or sparks of electricity. The feeling of their fingers brushing each others’ palms is soothing, and _right._ Instantly, the tension washes out of Rey’s body and her breathing falls into rhythm with his. Their eyes slip closed. This sense of peace reminds her of another time, and another place where she felt exactly the same….

...

 _In the vision Rey and Kylo are face-to-face, but somehow they are also both falling in different directions. Rey is consumed with terror- she feels like she’s plummeting downwards, being sucked into a white light that is so cold and bright that it threatens to freeze her solid. There is no up or down or left or right, no sense of direction or space. Only a powerful, ravenous force sucking her away into the icy light. It’s worse than starvation, worse than the desert sun, worse even then the torture Snoke put her mind through on_ The Supremacy.

_Kylo’s hand stretches out towards her from the opposite side, where he, too, is falling. There is only darkness behind him- deep, fiery darkness so hot that it will surely burn him to cinders. She cannot see his face for all the darkness, just he surely cannot see hers for all the light. The only thing they see is the outline of each other, consumed in all of that black and white. The pair reach towards each other but they are frozen in place, being constantly sucked backwards just as they fight that terrible gravity._

_It is impossible to tell who makes the first move, who fights harder. Perhaps the shift is simultaneous, or perhaps it simply_ happens _without any prompting at all. Either way- they somehow end up making a final, desperate lunge towards one another, not out of hope for salvation, but because they are trapped in the same terror with no one else who can possibly understand the depths of their horror. Their fingers brush- hope clenches in Rey’s chest, hope that all is not lost. They surge again, and grab onto each other._

_The change is instantaneous, so fast that Rey’s head spins and she couldn’t articulate what had happened even if she wanted to. The cold light and the fiery darkness are both gone, and instead the pair is suffused in a gentle greyish glow, tinged with the violet of a setting sun. It has no point of origin- it is simply there, embracing them alone with the whole universe._

_Now there is no gravity- they float in a cloud of cosmic dust. The silence is deep and tranquil; it goes on and on for an eternity. Rey can see Kylo’s face now- wide eyes, lips slightly parted with wonder, his soft black hair floating around his face, lifted gently as if by a breeze. She knows her own expression must be just like his. She feels it, as he surely must feel it: The calm, the sense of peace. The feeling that everything has somehow fallen away and the universe moves past them in a river of life and death. Rey holds onto Kylo’s arm tightly, knowing that this feeling will go on forever so long as she doesn’t let go. His grip is just as strong, just as desperate. Now that their eyes have locked, Rey can’t look away. She won’t. This is what she has been looking for her entire life- this is the end of the path she walks. This is where she is going, where she_ wants _to go, where she_ must _go._

 ... 

Kylo’s eyes snap open at the same time as Rey’s, and their gazes stop short in the middle. His face looks just like it did in the vision- full of wonder. Hers probably does too.

“I was wrong,” he murmurs, just a moment before she says the exact same thing.

“S- so was I. You were never going to turn-”

“-And neither were you-”

“-Because it’s not that simple.”

There is a pause. Rey can practically _see_ the wheels in Kylo’s head turning.

“You’re thinking what I’m thinking,” she says, more as a statement of fact than a question. He gives one tiny nod.

“I… yes, I suppose I am.”

“Is… is that even possible?”

“I don’t know. Maybe before the time of the Republic, or even before that. Luke… mentioned something or someone like that, a long time ago. He never spoke of her again, though.”

“Who?”

“Her name was Ahsoka Tano. She was a Force-Sensitive Togruta woman who fought in the Clone Wars. Supposedly she once studied under Anakin Skywalker.”

“And who’s he?”

“Anakin is… the name my grandfather went by before he fell to the Dark Side and… became Darth Vader.”

Rey’s eyes widen.

“Then Tano must be a powerful Jedi! Maybe she’s still alive, maybe we can find her!”

Kylo just shakes his head ruefully.

“Tano never became a Jedi Knight. She left the Order just before the Purge. Some say she became an intelligence agent during the early days of the rebellion, but no one knew what happened to her in the end. Luke tried to track her down, but she either died a long time ago, or went deep into hiding.”

Rey’s shoulders sag with disappointment.

“Then how are we gonna find out more? We have to know if it’s possible to straddle the light and dark. If it’s possible to be… what’s the term?”

“Grey Jedi,” he supplies. The term _clicks_ in Rey’s mind.

“Yeah. That.”

“The only lead I can think of for now is those texts.”

“I guess,” Rey sighs with mild disappointment. “How’s the progress on that anyway?”

Kylo’s lip twitches ever-so-subtly.

“It’s fine. Slow, but fine. Once I get the whole character alphabet translated, we can both get to work on the de-coding.”

“Do you need another page to work on? It’s been awhile.”

“That would be good,” he nods.

It’s only as Kylo is standing from his seat to go fetch the nearest text that Rey realizes, their hands are still clasped. They have been this entire time, and neither seemed to register it at all. She un-sticks her palm from his and her cheeks burn. His face is equally red as he crosses her bedroom and brings the dusty text back to the bedside where she sits. She watches in mild fascination as he fetches his pen and parchment to copy down the next two pages’ worth of characters, the neat black lines marching across the paper. The scratching of his pen is soothingly rhythmic.

He sighs when he is done and waves the pieces of parchment to dry the ink. Rey senses from his sigh, and from the slow stirring across the Bond, that he is unsatisfied with this thin lead of theirs.

“…Translating these texts is gonna take time that we don’t have,” he says at length, his dark eyes skimming the mysterious letters absentmindedly. Rey nods in agreement.

“The war is moving too fast. We have to take _action,_ Ben. And soon.”

“But what can the two of us _do_?” he wonders, twisting his mouth to the side in an expression of mild irritation. “You and I, we’re leaders of opposing forces and we can’t just _leave,_ as much as we’d like to. Our hands are tied.”

Rey tosses her sweaty hair out of her face and huffs at him.

“ _You’re_ complaining about your hands being tied?! At least you don’t have to deal with being poor and having a bounty on your head in every known system! You’ve got all the credits and resources you could ask for at your fingertips, you dolt!”

“And what do you suggest I do with it? I can just picture how that conversation would go. ‘Oh by the way, General Hux, I’d like to divert large portions of our resources away from the war and go hunt for ancient clues on a possibly non-existent branch of the Jedi Order’. Yeah, he’d love that,” Kylo quips, his voice dripping with sarcasm. Rey rolls her eyes at him.

“You don’t have to _tell_ him as much. You can pretend you’re hunting for me instead. Tell Hux that it’s a Force thing that he wouldn’t understand. Then you can just go wherever you want and pass it off as a Jedi-hunt.”

“Hux already hates the idea of the Force- and you- enough. I doubt he’d take kindly to me running off in search of you, especially since I already know where you are.”

“You’re the Supreme Leader- he’s not. What can he do about it? What you say goes, right?”

Kylo glances at her out the corner of his eye, and she sees with a flicker of hope that he’s considering it. Just as she thought, he says-

“I’ll… consider it.”

“Yeah, whatever,” she scoffs, smiling in a supremely self-satisfied manner.

 ...

And that is how the First Order ends up on Jakku while fruitlessly hunting for clues about the ‘Resistance’s whereabouts’- a.k.a, Kylo’s covert search for clues on the Grey Jedi.

An ‘executive decision’ is made to retrace the Rebels’ steps and follow old paths, known paths, to search for whatever has been overlooked. Usually, Kylo rarely participates in these decisions except to approve or disprove certain actions. He knows where the Resistance is anyway, since he knows where Rey is at all times. But the First Order doesn’t need to know that. He typically leaves the hunt under Hux’s control, preferring to preside over the expansion of his Empire instead.

But now he has a plan. He changes his tactics. He sends teams out to search places where Rebels have hidden before, where they could hide again. Many of these coincide with former Jedi temples and relics. He especially focuses his investigative parties on these place. Based on the nature of the soldiers’ reports and the detailed photo-evidence they’ve been instructed to take, he can spread the undercover search from there.

However, it throws Kylo for a loop when someone suggests that they go to Jakku, the former home of the elusive Last Jedi. He is immediately overwhelmed by the urge to see the place in the flesh, though he has been there countless times in memory. He _must_ go, despite the futility of it. He knows it is a useless gesture. But he has no choice in the matter, now that the idea has been planted in his head- he is too impulsive to say no to himself.

Hux casts Kylo a wary glare when the Supreme Leader announces that he is personally accompanying the investigative party. Kylo knows he has been less-than-subtle about hiding his personal investment in Rey. At one point, Hux even accused him of being ‘fascinated with the Rebel scum’, though he wasn’t able to finish the sentence after Kylo nearly crushed his windpipe. Kylo reassures his Commanders that he is only accompanying the party in case they should happen upon the Jedi. He can list off any number of conceivable reasons for wanting to be there: that he is the only one who has a chance of fending her off if she attacks them, that he might be able to pick up traces of her Force signature and use it to track her, that he feels obligated to finish what he started and obliterate the last of the Jedi. That had been his original quest, after all. This seems to appease Hux. No one questions the logic of his decision again-

-That is, until he is actually _there._ Kylo didn’t anticipate the effect that Niima outpost would have on him. He stands under the tattered canopies of the scrap-cleaning yard in a daze, remembering this place the way _she_ remembers it. He has never set foot here in his life, and yet he is intimately aware of all its nooks and crannies, of which spots at the benches belong to which scrappers, of what it feels like to hold the scrub brushes in his hands and have the acrid stink of the cleaning-oil sear the inside of his nose. While his officers question the mechanics who preside over the shipyard that Rey stole the _Millenium Falcon_ from, Kylo wanders over the packed sand and experiences his vision of Rey all over again.

When their hands touched in the quiet confines of the hut on Ahch-To, Rey saw Kylo’s future and he saw her past. He saw it in a rapid stream of memory, looking through her eyes as if they were his own: years and years, flashing by in the space of seconds. He hasn’t taken much time to pick through these memories one by one. But now they unfurl their wings for him, prompted by sights and touches and specific noises that are all-too-familiar to Rey. He has his mental walls clamped firmly shut so that Rey won’t know he’s here, and yet, she is so very _present_ in this place that he keeps feeling the urge to look over his shoulder and search for her shape in the crowd of nervous scavengers and traders.

He doesn’t notice the other inhabitants of Niima outpost- they steer widely clear of him, waiting in shivering silence for the First Order officers to conclude their business and leave. They don’t all know who Kylo is specifically, but they can sense his importance in the way the officers defer to him, the way the storm troopers position themselves around him. Some of the scavengers even bow and scrape as he passes. They kneel as if in supplication for their lives, even though he hasn’t even threatened to hurt anyone.

Yet.

He keeps up this record-breaking streak of non-violence for a while. He’s quite lost in his own thoughts. Most of his officers are occupied in the shipyard, and the storm troopers wait just outside the curtains, watching the inhabitants like hawks. Kylo is mostly alone amongst the junk traders, whose presence he barely registers.

Until he comes up to the trade-in booth, and encounters Unkar Plutt.

Kylo’s pupils dilate with sudden recognition. He has never seen Plutt with his own eyes before, but a stream of images is dancing before his mind’s eye, so bright that it’s blinding. So much of Rey’s rage orbits Unkar Plutt- this ugly, fleshy creature who thought that he owned her. Without warning, Kylo is plunged into a horrifically detailed recollection of one particular encounter.

 ...

 _She is somewhere around ten years old, though she doesn’t know exactly because no one has told her the star-date in a while. She has been gone from under the dubious shade of Plutt’s wing for about a year. She couldn’t take the beatings anymore. But being independent of Plutt is harder than she thought. She has not been doing well for the past couple of weeks, all on her own. She is hungry: hungry enough to weep, hungry enough to kill, hungry enough to do_ anything. _She is practically shaking with the weakness of starvation as she staggers into the scrapyard with a few trinkets in hand: the only things she could get a hold of, in her state. Plutt sneers at her meager offerings and says,_

_“That’s a half-portion, if I’m generous.”_

_Rey cannot comprehend. She drops the parts in the sand, she is leaning on her staff as she begins to cry from grief, and the staff is the only thing holding her upright. The other scavengers either avert their eyes or laugh at her._

_There is a sound above her, something that Plutt obviously thinks could pass for ‘soothing’. Those greasy hands find her and lift her, and she is brought back into the shade of his hut where he keeps the portions. Her eyes are so swamped with tears, she can’t see where the food is. She doesn’t have the strength to snatch it and run anyway. She is laid on a cot of some sort, and Unkar’s blurry shape leans over her._

_“Be a good little girl, don’t fight it, and you can have as much to eat as you want, huh?” he rasps. His fleshy fingers are creeping under her tunic. She doesn’t understand, but she nods, and she is still shaking, and then she is crying out in pain, but biting her lip to shut herself up at his urging, because she is too hungry to say no to him. She doesn’t know what he’s doing or why, but she_ has _to if she wants to eat. She weeps in silence, because she has to survive at all cost so that her family can come back for her-_

_..._

Encounters like these were not unique, after that. Rey continued to suffer for her survival, right up to the day when she finally left Jakku. But this memory: this was the first of the many. Rey remembers this one moment as the moment when she learned to _hate_ , and it is seared into her mind so strongly that it hurts Kylo to look at.

Kylo stares at the folds of Plutt’s face from under his hood, but the world is no longer defined in blue and yellow and beige and shadow and light anymore. All he sees is varying shades of red. He is too busy fighting off the horribly vivid memory to register what the junk trader is saying to him. His sense of hearing has been swallowed in a deep, bone-shaking roar. Plutt’s mouth immediately stops moving as Kylo’s lightsaber appears in his hand and, almost of its own volition, comes screaming to life. The blade levels on Plutt, hovering just inches from his nose, and everyone freezes. To the outsider, Kylo’s face has morphed into a terrifying, nearly inhuman mask of rage. His shoulders shudder with every panting breath he sucks in. The hot, dry air drags in his lungs. He hisses through bared teeth, barely loud enough for anyone but him and Plutt and a few bystanders to hear-

“ _You-_ You sick _bastard,_ you will _pay for what you've done!”_

There is a split second for Plutt to be confused. Then the saber moves, screeching through the air so fast that no one actually sees anything except a flash of light. There is a _thump_ and a _hiss_ , followed by an agonized wail as Unkar’s arm separates from his body and hits the sand. Blood steams off of the lightsaber’s blade. Kylo drinks in the sounds of the trader’s agony for a few seconds, and then holds his hand out to silence it, drawing on the Darkside which swells hungrily within him. The last sound Plutt makes is a strangled choking noise and then-

_Splat._

Bits of Unkar paint the inside of the hut- a piece of entrail here, a section of midriff there, a fragment of bone on the counter. Amidst the panicked screaming and the scavengers scrambling to get away, Kylo stands with his arm still extended, blood dripping from his glove. He is breathing hard as he waits for the haze to lift. He is left to survey his grisly handiwork. A few drops of blood stick to his cheek. The only part of Plutt that has a form left, that hasn’t been reduced to masticated flesh, is the arm that lies at Kylo’s feet. The rest of the blood congeals in the sand, and the air clouds with a bitter sort of stink, as if the junk trader has already begun rotting.

Kylos’ officers converge on the scene when they hear the screaming, but the Supreme Leader very calmly waves them away. He hooks his lightsaber back on his belt and wipes his glove on the hem of his cloak, still staring at the reddish-brown stain that was once Unkar Plutt.

“What happened here, my lord?” asks the woman Lieutenant. The only sign of her trepidation is her wide eyes and shaking hands, which she hides behind her back. Kylo can feel her shock, though, the way he senses the base emotions of most people. It is moments like these when he wishes he couldn’t hear thoughts.

“I read the junk trader’s mind, and he was a Rebel-sympathizing piece of scum who thought he could talk down to the First Order. I made him into an example.”

The woman opens her mouth, then closes it again, thinking twice about contradicting him. When one puts the murder in the context Kylo has given, the word _excessive_ comes to mind. The way her eyes are trained on the ground, she probably suspects the lie. This manner of death is too personal to simply be a political execution, and she knows it.

 _Fuck it,_ Kylo thinks.

“Conclude your business here,” he commands the officers, still watching the blood dry in the sand, “and then burn this outpost to the ground. Strafe it to rubble.”

Then Kylo raises his cowl and turns towards the desert, towards the path that leads out into the Badlands. He only makes it one step before the woman calls,

“But- but sir, where are you going?”

“I must check on something before we leave this planet. When you’re done carrying out your directive, prime the engines. We’ll depart upon my return.”

“…Yes sir,” the Lieutenant nods. Then Kylo wraps one end of his scarf around his nose and mouth, tugs the cowl over his face to shield his eyes from the blistering sun, and forges out over the dunes.

 ...

He knows the way thanks to his vision, which he wishes now more than ever he could get out of his head. Hopefully this visit will put some of it to rest.

 _Or you’ll make it worse,_ hisses that voice in his mind that has taken up residence in the place where Snoke used to be. _You’ll just pry the wound open wider. You’ll let more of the light pour into your soul, let more of the weakness claim you. This is self-sabotage. This is masochism. You aren’t doing this for her sake, you vain, pitiful fool. You’re plunging yourself into her failings and her pain, so you can forget about your own. You’re just_ punishing _yourself._

Still, Kylo trudges over the dunes, one foot in front of the other, toes stabbing into the sand, heels twisting as he seeks purchase. It’s murder on the calves, and his all-black outfit isn’t helping. He’s lucky the sun is starting to set, or he would have been baked alive by now. Sweat soaks every crevice underneath his body armor, dripping from his hair into his eyes. He has to squint through the dust. No wonder Rey is such a wiry little spitfire, he thinks. Even moving through the terrain on this planet feels like a life-and-death struggle, and he’s not out-of-shape by any means.

At last, just as the sun is touching the horizon, Kylo mounts a last sand dune and sees ' _it'_   framed against the bloody horizon.

The fallen AT-AT is the only thing for miles. The dark hulk lies on its side, half-buried in the dust, like the picked-over carcass of a beast. Kylo slides down the dune towards it, approaching with a cautious sort of reverence. He almost sets his foot down on what looks like an electro-pulse mine, though he notices the subtle bulge in the sand just in time. He can feel the slight disturbances it causes in the energy flow around it. He crouches to examine the trap, then looks around at the path ahead of him. There are more mines buried between him and the AT-AT, some more well-hidden than others. It is mostly by instinct that he is able to pick his way around them. The same instinct lets him know that he cannot touch the first frame of the entry-hatch that forms the door of Rey’s old home- it is still electrified, with enough charge running through the metal that if he put both hands on it to pull himself up, it’ll knock him out cold.

 _Clever girl, clever traps. A lot of trouble just to keep intruders out of this junk heap,_ he thinks as he grabs the second frame of the entry chute and hauls himself inside. There are divots worn into the grooved metal frame, where Rey's fingers have latched onto the same place a thousand times. His cloak and the end of his scarf trail over the ground as he shimmies up the chute and into the cockpit of the AT-AT, placing his feet carefully. He un-winds the scarf from his face once he’s made it inside, taking deep breaths of the slightly cooler air.

The space is dim, its only illumination coming from the dying sunlight that leaks through rusted-out holes in the walls. It is so cramped in here that Kylo must stand hunched-over, with one hand braced on the ceiling. It is perfectly Rey-sized, but for anyone else, it’s a tight squeeze.

He blinks a few times as his eyes adjust. When he gets a good look at his surroundings, he internally retracts his opinion on the ‘junk heap’. An inexplicable, numb sort of weight has settled into the space behind his breastbone, and his disdain is replaced by a terrible ache.

The hammock hanging off to one side has an indent in the middle. It sways gently in the draft which these walls can no longer keep out. He can picture her curled into a tiny ball in that indent, her arms wrapped around herself to ward against the nighttime chill. In her absence, a thin coating of dust has settled over every surface. The familiar tracks and patterns of how she moved through this space are fading, and disuse has thrown a pall over the room. The curtain that once separated the hammock’s corner from the rest of the hollowed-out chamber has been reduced to ribbons. It’s apparent that a dust storm has been through here at least once, if not twice, since Rey left. The sand has settled into places where it doesn’t belong: in piles in the corners, in the pot where she heated her water over the tiny stove, in the dish where she wolfed down portions of poly-starch rations with her fingers, and on the shelf where she stood up her figurines or hung her various trinkets, little shiny things suspended by bits of wire. They tinkle softly as Kylo trails his fingers across them, and if he didn’t know better, he could have sworn that he heard her voice in them, saw her reflection in the dull glances of light on their surfaces.

There is an echo of her here. It is a phantom made out of dust, which barely outlines her shape, disappearing when he tries to focus his gaze on it. She’s left the imprint of her soul on this place, but it is an old and outdated imprint. There are traces of her essence trapped within the walls, staining every surface that she’s touched. This essence doesn’t feel the same as the one he’s familiar with. The Rey he knows is somehow kinder and wiser than the phantom that lives here. This old shade of Rey is a gritty, dirty, tough, desperate, and bitter thing, from the time before he met her. The time she put behind her.

There is a specific spot here that tugs at him, more than any other feature of this makeshift home. The spot is tight and tense, like a knot in the Force, a place where energy halts and tangles and everything hurts. An injury in the energies of this place. Kylo lowers his cowl. He creeps forward and places his gloved hands against the wall opposite him, and he feels them rather than sees them in the dimness. The marks. All those marks, from the floor to the ceiling, one after another, one for each grueling day. There are neat rows, and there are smaller, messier rows fit in-between the first rows, and then there are diagonal marks crammed into the corners and whatever spaces she could find. Like someone who is writing and runs out of room on the page, so they scrawl the last few letters in one corner. Fourteen years’ worth of marks.

They are less a way of measuring the time than they are a testament to it. One of those routines that keeps you from insanity, that gives your time meaning even as it slips by you into the void of meaninglessness. The marks are senseless to anyone but Rey. For her, the marks constituted the only sense she had in her life until the day she left. Kylo cannot bear it, it hurts to look at. He tugs his gloves off with his teeth and presses his palms to the rusted surface of the metal panel, his shaking fingers curling over the scratched-out tallies. He closes his eyes and feels them instead. Five and five and five all over again, four marks connected by the fifth slash, which is always angrier than the rest. The four are methodical, but the fifth is like a wound. All that futile determination, all that waiting for something she knew wasn’t coming, that still hasn’t come, and never will.

Rey has not returned here. Kylo would have been able to sense the difference in its energy if she had. This place is still trapped in her pain, in the void of her loneliness and denial. She has accepted that her parents are not coming for her, that they are not worth seeking out, that they are dead and gone and better for it. If she had come back here with that grieving acceptance in her heart, this place would not be a wound any longer. It would have stitched itself shut and scarred over. But it is still here, trapped, and bleeding.

 _All the wasted years… the wasted years… if only I had known,_ Kylo thinks deliriously. Of course, there is no way he ever could have known who she was or what she would mean to him one day, so it’s useless for him to think like that. And even if he _had_ known, what could he have done? Nothing would have changed. She would have wasted that time anyway, friendless and wanting. What happened in this place is not his burden to carry.

And yet, its weight drags at him all the same.

A bestial roar shakes the AT-AT’s frame from head to toe. When the tremors stop, there is a massive dent in the marked-up wall where his fist collapsed it. He stands there with his knuckles braced against the metal, throbbing, and he wonders if he can make this secondary pain stop if he destroys this place like he destroyed Niima Outpost. If he blows the hulking wreck apart, scatters the shards of her old life over the desert. All this suffering that she represses, all the pain that she has taught herself not to feel, is now his pain, and he feels like he might split apart at the seams if he doesn’t get rid of it. Niima was a hell-hole, and it was never hers, so she wouldn’t be broken up if she found out what he’d done to it. It was a blot on the map, happily wiped out. He stands there and considers doing the same to the AT-AT, his shoulders trembling at the thought.

But he can’t do it. This place is the corner of Jakku that Rey claimed for her own. It is her home, her shelter, her safety, and her prison all in one. And it is her wound to heal, not his. It would be sacrilegious for him to destroy this place for her.

So he leaves it at that. He forces himself to turn on his heel, clamber out, and leave. The only testament to his presence there is the dent he leaves behind, and his scarf, pooled on the floor next to the place where he knelt, left behind in his haste to be gone from this graveyard of memory.

He is too exhausted when he makes it back to the smoldering rubble of Niima Outpost to comment on its efficient destruction. The riffraff have fled, and his boots crunch over ash and embers in the silence. The sun has set. A startling cold has sunk its claws into the sand. Kylo is grateful when the transport ship’s ramp hisses closed behind him. The officers and the storm troopers are quiet. Their morbid curiosity to know what he found (but their fear of asking him) is so strong, Kylo has to resist the urge to roll his eyes.

He sits in the transport with his hands folded in front of his mouth, waiting for the turbulence of atmospheric exit to abate. He seriously considers giving the order to obliterate the entire planet. Even without Starkiller base, it can be done. No one would miss Jakku, not really. His empire would be better off without it. But he’s had enough of destroyed planets after watching what Hux did to the Hosnian system, and besides, he hates to think what Rey would say if she found out that he blew up the entire population along with it. There isn’t a single creature on that dust-pile that cared for her, but knowing her, she’d be angry about it anyway if he killed them all.

The moment they’ve cleared the atmosphere, a comm from Hux lights up the line. Kylo wordlessly presses the button on his command chair, and Hux’s sour, drawn face projects in front of him.

“Supreme Leader. I trust your excursion was fruitful?”

Kylo chews on the inside of his lip, choosing his words carefully.

“Unfortunately, we discovered little that will get us closer to finding the Resistance. However, we uncovered and executed several Rebel sympathizers. And I gained some… valuable _insights_ on the Jedi’s past, which we may very well be able to use against her in the future.”

There is the slightest narrowing of Hux’s eyes, as if he is suspicious of what Kylo means by _insights._ The Supreme Leader resigns himself to the fact that Hux will no doubt uncover the details of Unkar Plutt’s death soon enough. The General is too savvy to let something like that slide. Kylo ought to be more worried about Hux’s behind-the-scenes activities, but he can’t seem to muster up the energy to be concerned anymore. He knows that Hux will find out what he finds out, and that’s that.

Once they’ve signed off, the ship makes the jump to hyperspace- back to the _Supremacy_.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Boy's gonna be in deep shit next time he sees Rey, amiright? Amiright? Hehehee


	5. Sideways plans

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Rey leads a raid. This chapter is unfortunately Kylo-less, but hey, there are other aspects to Rey's character besides him. She is a FIERCE AND INDEPENDENT WOMAN.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry it's so short, I've been stuck in writer's block for awhile. It was either post two short chapters or wait another week to post one really long chapter. I figured option A was preferable.

* * *

 

            Rey doesn’t see Kylo for awhile after their conversation about the idea of the Grey Jedi. She’s okay with that- she needs the time to rest and recover anyway. She heals with surprising alacrity, which Rose comments on. The girl shrugs and attributes it to her Force-sensitivity, although she is curious to know more about the healing powers of the Force. She supposes she just has to wait until Kylo gets back to her with more decoded pages.

            For some reason she can’t put a finger on, she spends a lot of time thinking about Leia while she’s resting in bed. Perhaps it’s because of Avix and Halsey’s visits. The three Generals have staged a temporary conference room in Rey’s bedchamber, since they want to keep her included in their decision-making processes. The three of them cloistered in her room, hunched over maps spread on the sheets, reminds her of the days leading directly up to Leia’s death. The Generals used to talk to Leia like this too, in her final days.

            Or maybe it’s because of Kylo. Despite her best efforts, he occupies her thoughts more than she likes to admit. The image of his face constantly swims up to her mind’s eye during the day- those sensitive lips twitching here and there, the occasional tilt of his head, those dark eyes flashing with suppressed emotion. Those deep, soulful eyes that remind Rey so much of Leia’s. Whenever she sees his face or hears his voice in her mind, she knows she’s imagining it- the Bond has been quiet for a while now, giving the pair a welcome rest. But she imagines him reacting to her conversations, making little comments here and there. It’s almost like he’s actually there, eavesdropping on her life. She finds it mildly annoying, that she can imagine his reactions to things so well.

            She’s back on her feet in the space of a week, thanks to the expedited healing process. On the eighth morning after the attack, she wakes up feeling energized. There is no ache in her ribs when she does her morning stretches. After a cool wash in the ‘fresher and a change of clothes, she feels like a new woman. The fever is flushed from her body. She hums happily as she braids her hair. She decides she’s going to surprise her friends in the mess hall by taking breakfast with them. Then she’ll check up on Chewie and the Falcon, and report to the _real_ conference room so she can dive back into her work. They still haven’t conducted the raid yet- only the preliminary reconnaissance. They’re waiting for their Jedi to join them.

            She’s just fixing her General’s pin to the lapel of her tunic when a knock sounds on the door. She calls for them to come in, and Rose enters looking surprised, if delighted.

            “You’re looking chipper, General!” the other girl teases. Rey grins at her.

            This is the moment when she suddenly senses something _very_ wrong in the Force.

            She used to get premonitions like this all the time, though as a child, she didn’t know what they were. Now, however, she pinpoints the exact problem. Something on the other end of the Bond is practically throbbing with pain.

            Her face falls when she feels it, though she gives her head a shake to clear it. She gets control of her facial expression before Rose can comment, though the other girl looks concerned.

            “Whoa, are you alright?” she wonders, her hands fluttering up like she wants to help but doesn’t know what’s wrong. Rey blows the breath out of her mouth.

            “I’m… I’m fine. Just a twinge. Let’s go get breakfast, huh? I wanna see the look on Finn’s face when I surprise him!”

            Rose grins and chirps ‘okay!’. The two set off towards the mess hall with Rey trailing just behind, so that Rose won’t see her intense frown of concentration.

            It doesn’t take her long to ferret out what happened, back on Jakku. She simmers and broods about it all morning, and probably does a shitty job of hiding it from her freinds. She can sense bits and pieces through the patchy walls that Kylo puts up, and she is less than pleased with his actions and the subsequent reactions.

            _The worst part is that he thinks he’s being sneaky about it,_ she thinks as she wolfs down dinner later that night. _As if I wouldn’t know! I swear I’m gonna knock him into next week when I see him!_

But the thing that’s more concerning than the ripples of distress and anger from the Bond is the deafening silence that follows. She _doesn’t_ see him.

            _Well fine,_ she later thinks, _He can go ahead and be as sulky as he wants. My life doesn’t revolve around him. I have more important things to think about._

And she does. The big raid- the Resistance’s first major move since the Battle of Crait (otherwise known in Rey’s mind as ‘Ben’s giant temper tantrum’)- is in its final stages of planning. Rey is only back on her feet for two days before they pack everyone onto the _Falcon_ and Poe’s X-wing.

            The _Falcon_ hums happily as she takes off into hyperspace, bringing a grin to both Rey and Chewie’s faces. This is what the ship was built and bred for- mischief and debauchery. Although, this mischief is in the name of justice and freedom. The _Falcon_ doesn’t really care either way, so long as there’s trouble to stir up.

            Rey and Chewie use that risky trick that Han tried all those months ago on Starkiller base. They don’t pull out of hyperspace until they’re already in the atmosphere of Utapau’s moon, under the First Order base’s sensors. They’re thinking of labeling it the Solo Maneuver in honor of the crazy bastard who came up with it. Only Rey, Chewie, and Poe could have pulled it off, but pull it off they do. Thankfully, there are fewer trees and mountains to smash on. They don’t crash-land this time, though they come close. Poe, who is insane enough to try the trick too but not Han-Solo-level-insane, undershoots and pulls up a split second too soon. He lands smack in the middle of the base’s sensor range, but immediately dives under it. No doubt his little X-wing shows up as nothing more than a tiny blip on the radar, too small to take notice of unless the enemy radar technician is watching the screen religiously.

Once they’ve landed, Poe, Rose Finn, Rey, Chewbacca, and the other four resistance fighters convene once more to go over the plan. It proceeds as such:

            They’ll creep the ships in as close to the base as they dare. Rose discovered a small, cone-shaped blind spot on the ground on her recon mission, so they’ll secret the ships there. They’ll prop the _Falcon’s_ bay doors open and turn the ships nose-outward for a quick load-up and speedy escape. Poe’s gunner, a quiet Gand who only goes by his surname of Turr’Ra, will remain behind with Chewie to keep the engines primed. Meanwhile, the rest of the team goes ahead to the base. Like Utapau, the moon is pockmarked with massive sinkholes, though unlike Utapau, it doesn’t sport many of the infamous bone-cities within those sinkholes. The surface is also not completely barren like its mother planet. There are enough trees and shrubs for the raid group to sneak in, and that’s one of the reasons they’ve chosen this particular base to raid.

            They’ll creep up to the base on foot, where they’ll lay in wait for a patrol to come by. Rey will hopefully kidnap one of the patrol and either convince them to give her the access codes, or steal the information directly from their mind. She’s not sure if she knows how to read minds like Kylo does, but she’ll certainly give it a try. She pulled it off before, so with any luck she can do it again.

            They’ll use the access codes to get into the storage bay, which Rose has already infiltrated once, while leaving behind some guards to keep the way open for their retreat. Rose knows exactly which supplies they’re taking and has secretly marked the floating supply pallets. She also stole a pallet control, so they’ll be able to divert the floating pallets’ courses and bring them along without having to carry all the supplies by hand. Rey will keep lookout and use her mind trick to divert attention from them in case they’re discovered, though they only plan to be inside the complex for a few minutes, maybe less. It’s a small, solitary base that the First Order has only just put in place in recent years. They have to get in and out quick, though, because if they give the base time to get a distress signal to the larger stations on the main planet of Utapau, they’ll all be capital-f Fucked.

            This, of course, is what they’ve brought Poe and his X-wing for. They’re hoping that, should worst come to worst, Poe and Turr’Ra will be able to divert attention from the _Falcon_ long enough for everyone to get away before they then hyper-jump themselves.

            The mission rides on two risky variables, however: one, that the base on Utapau’s moon doesn’t have the hyperspace tracking capability that the First Order’s main fleet did all those weeks ago, and two, that the raiders will be able to either disable the standard tracker chips on the floating supply pallets before Rose’s dampeners wear off, or they’ll be able to destroy the pallets altogether. The supplies are magnetically fastened to the pallets, and detaching the crates from the pallets will take too long, so they’ve got to get rid of the trackers before they make their first hyperspace jump. If it takes too long, they’ll have to chuck the supplies back into space and flee to avoid compromising their own base.

            Based on the original recon mission, Rose is almost certain that a newly established Outer Rim base like this won’t have the hyper-space tracking capabilities that the First Order’s main fleet did. The standard tracker chips shouldn’t be too much of a problem, with Finn’s knowledge, Rey’s technical abilities, and Rose’s ingenuity on their side. But the window of opportunity will be narrow.

            Out of the group, only the General and her three officers are human. Most of the new recruits, and the old surviving ones in the Resistance, have been non-humans. The First Order makes a point of highlighting human-supremacy, which doesn’t exactly endear them to the non-human races. The Gand Turr’Ra is taciturn and also a bit strange by their standards, (he refers to himself in the third person and insists that he hasn’t earned a first name, which is why he goes by his surname) but a good gunner who follows orders near perfectly. The young tawny-furred Togorian, Qarhara, is a stealthy hunter with great instincts. Rey is convinced that his grey-striped elder sister, Meeran, is a Force-sensitive, though Rey keeps her convictions to herself for now, since Meeran hasn’t yet displayed any of the signs. Maybe she’s like Rey used to be: waiting on an awakening. Then there’s the dry-witted Nashaala, a green-skinned Duros woman who, with the photographic memory of her people, makes a perfect reconnaissance operative. The Duros people have little reason to love the First Order or its forerunner the Empire, given Duro’s long history of oppression and persecution. Nashaala was with Rose on the original recon, so she’ll be able to tell at a glance if anything is different or out-of-place from the last time. She’ll let them know of any traps with plenty of warning.

            Once Rey is sure everyone’s on the same page, they start with the first phase of the plan. They move the ships into position, then spend the next hour sneaking through the underbrush to the packed-dirt path which circles the base. According to Finn, standard procedure for patrols is to vary the length and breadth of circuits from day to day and from hour to hour so that every league is within someone’s eyesight or radar range at every minute of the day. But here in the Outer Rim, on a brand-new base where nothing ever happens, the guard troopers seem not to care too much about standard procedure. There’s a packed-dirt path running in a circle around the base, and they keep close to it, for the most part. The path is safe, the path is ordinary. The path carries no risk of accidentally plunging into one of the many large and small sinkholes of this moon. The patrols are timed in rough intervals of half an hour, so all the raid party has to do is crouch and wait.

            Rose and Finn have constructed a radar-and-sensor dampener which is resistant to most First Order tech, but only for a short time. So they hang back from the path, for now. Rey goes ahead into radar range, using her minimal knowledge of energy signatures to disguise herself from the radar. She has to bend all of her concentration on it, which is why she almost misses the passage of the patrol she was waiting on. Their bored voices are what snaps her out of it and reminds her of her duty. She counts the seconds and minutes after they’ve passed until she’s absolutely sure that they’ve gone out of radar range. At what is roughly the fifteen-minute mark, she cups her hands around her mouth and sets off a soft trill. The sound is an imitation of an unnamed desert avian on Jakku that everyone just calls Rap-birds, because they have a bad habit of rapping their knobby beaks on the empty metal hulls they make their nests in. The rusty bird-call has no place on a green planet like this, which is why the other Resistance fighters are listening for it. They hear her signal, and move up to her position.

            Rose turns on the dampener when she gets there, shoving it back in her pocket. The dampeners last an average of twenty minutes before they have to be charged again and only have a radius of half a league, so everyone sticks close to Rose. If Rey has timed everything correctly, that means the raid party has five minutes of leeway in order to catch one of the three-man patrols and ‘malfunction’ the radar. Then Rey will have another fifteen minutes to extract the access codes. After that, they absolutely _must_ move either forward or backward by one league in order to stay out of radar range of the next patrol. If Rey succeeds, they’ll move forward and into the base before they’re discovered. If she fails, they’ll have to retreat and come up with something else.

            The team is on noise-discipline at the moment to avoid detection, but they still get silently antsy as the minutes tick by. Rey’s throat constricts with each passing second as she wonders, terrified, if she timed it wrong. Thankfully Meeran, whose senses are somewhat stronger than her brother’s, (another reason why Rey is convinced that the Togorian is Force-Sensitive) smells the patrol before anyone else hears or sees them. The wind is blowing the right way. Rey’s timing is a little late, but still with a few minutes to spare. Meeran’s ears prick, and then her brother, following her cue, also tilts his head to listen. The pair nod to the rest of the raid group, making the hand signal for ‘incoming’. Rey adjusts her grip on staff and blaster- the weapons she chose for this particular raid. In that moment she sorely misses her lightsaber.

            The party agreed beforehand that the trooper most likely to have the access codes is the one carrying the radar apparatus. Meeran and Qarhara slink up into the trees, predatory and feline in their near-perfect silence. They position themselves in the branches on either side of the path, peering downward. Rey, meanwhile, rises to a half-crouch and re-wraps her dull grey scarf to disguise her shape. She, and the rest of the raiders, pull their hoods up over their faces.

            The patrol comes into view, and everything is almost ruined when the astonished raid party realizes there are _four_ troopers in this patrol, not three like all the others. Everyone freezes, and the patrol almost goes right by them. But Poe saves all of them when he shouts,

            “ _Now,_ idiots!”

            This galvanizes the team into action. Qarhara and Meeran drop from the tree branches onto the two unladen storm troopers on either side, knocking them out on impact and giving them a good whack over the helmet just to make sure. Rey goes straight for the throat of the one carrying the radar pack as planned, and Rose is right beside her, tazing the unexpected guest into  unconscious silence. Trust Rose’s reflexes to save the day!

            The one with the radar pack, who is now the only one conscious, wisely closes his mouth over the scream he was about to let loose when he feels the cold end of Rey’s staff prod his chin, ready to bludgeon him in the throat if he makes a sound. All he sees are a pair of dark feline shapes lurking in the corners of his vision over the inert bodies of his squad members, and the two slight women wrapped in grim greys, whose faces he can’t make out under the shadow of their hoods. The taller of the two women says in a cold, commanding whisper-

            “Shout and we’ll end you and your comrades right here.”

            The man nods a tiny bit- as much as he can with the staff under his chin- and whispers through the helmet,

            “W-who are you and what d-do you want?”

            “Access codes,” the woman demands, ignoring the first part of the question. The man steels himself, swallows hard, and shakes his head. She prods harder.

            “I said, _access codes,”_ she growls. The smaller woman lights up her tazer, which makes the trooper shrivel. But still he shakes his head as if dumb and mute.

            Rey is at a loss. Back on Jakku she was a master of intimidating other scrappers into leaving her alone, and although she doesn’t like it, she’s prepared to follow through on her threat. But they don’t have time to hide dead bodies and capture a different patrol. They _have_ to get the access codes from this one, and _now._

            The idea that occurs to her is stupid and risky, but since it’s her only idea and she has very little time to weigh its wisdom, she just goes with it.

            She straightens her spine regally and then, still holding the staff against the trooper’s throat with one hand, flicks her hood down to reveal her stern face.

            “I am Rey of Jakku,” she declares, imbuing her words with a sinister hum of the Force, “and you will give me the access codes or I will kill you and your comrades here and now.”

            The trooper’s whole body tenses with recognition. Before Rey knows it, he is on his knees before her. The modulated voice begs her through the helmet-

            “Please, please don’t hurt us! I’ll give you the codes, whatever you want, just don’t kill us all!”

            Rey’s eyes widen slightly. She didn’t expect it to work _that_ well. She and Rose exchange glances. A slow, mischievous smile spreads across both their faces.

… 

            Less than an hour later, the raid party stands in the cargo bay of the _Falcon_ flushed with the glow of triumph. Hyperspace flashes by around them- they’re well on their way to the second jump point by now. And yet, despite the rousing success of their mission, they’re all staring silently. The subject of their scrutiny is the pile of semi-conscious, handcuffed storm troopers that sits amidst the crates of stolen supplies, which float peacefully on their tracker-disabled pallets.

            _“Approaching the second jump point,”_ comes Turr’Ra’s clicking, insectoid voice over the comm. Almost directly afterward, Poe asks-

            _“Well? What’re we gonna do with ‘em? We’ve gotta decide if we’re pitching ‘em into space before we get to the third jump.”_

Finally, Rey breaks her silence and sighs. She crouches down next to Finn, who is also crouched in front of the four troopers. He looks from one to the other and back, meeting their eyes and holding their gaze for several seconds before moving to the next. He’s been doing this basically since the prisoners woke up. Their helmets are all off now, so he can make eye contact with them. The one who had the radar is a man- the other three are women. The extra trooper who surprised them before is an officer. The only one who’s fully conscious is the man- the other three are still a bit dazed from having been knocked out and/or tazed. Their gazes are wild and distant, but they don’t speak.

            Everyone has been quiet because it seemed as if Finn was gathering himself for something- some speech or declaration of terms to the prisoners. But he’s said nothing, so Rey speaks instead. She asks a question which has been gnawing on her ever since the beginning of the raid. She looks at the man- the first one she spoke to- and wonders,

            “Why are you so afraid of me?”

            Because, without a doubt, these four are dead terrified of Rey. They instantly recognized her name, and complied with every order she gave them as if they feared for their lives. Kriff’s sake, the radar technician even _escorted_ the raiders through the base to the cargo bay! He let them right in, led them to the supplies, unlocked the security systems on the pallets so that they could disable the trackers with ease, and helped them load! The raiders got away with twice the haul they expected to take, it was so criminally easy. Then the man allowed himself and his comrades to be bound and led away like sheep! The troopers haven’t even said a word since they were brought onto the _Falcon-_ they just stare at her and Finn like they expect to be killed any second.

            The man gawps at her like she’s asked him a joke question. He stammers,

            “Y- you’re Rey of J-Jakku! There’s a b-bounty on your head in every system b-big enough to buy a _moon_! You’re the F-First Order’s number-one enemy!”

            Rey sighs again.

            “Yes yes, I know all that, but why are _you_ so terrified?”

            “You… You killed Supreme Leader Snoke,” he whispers in a tremulous voice. A bead of sweat trickles down his temple. “And you killed the whole Praetorian guard, and you almost killed Kylo Ren. Those are like, the ten strongest people in the entire galaxy!”

            Rey almost bursts out laughing. She has to clear her throat and then let out a little cough to hide it, though her cheek still flush red. She can hear Rose behind her, on the edge of tears, choking herself in an effort to keep silent.

            “What uh…. What’s your information source on this?” Rey prompts.

            “T-The public statement the First Order put out, of course. They say the information comes directly from General Hux himself. T-There’s warnings about you on every holonews broadcast!”

            Finally, Rose loses it. Rey hears her roaring with laughter, and though Finn doesn’t join in, just about everyone else does. The confused troopers look from one to the other and back, and their bewilderment only adds to the hilarity. The laughing doesn’t stop until everyone loses the ability to breathe.

            “Oh yeah,” Meeran gasps at last, “She’s a real menace to galactic society, our General!”

            “A right terror!” echoes her brother.

            Finally, Finn turns and snaps-

            “Do you guys think this is fucking funny?!”

            The unexpected harshness of his voice shuts them all up quite effectively. Rey flushes red again and clears her throat.

            “Well, uh… maybe a little. Look, Finn, it’s not my fault the First Order’s spreading all that propaganda. It’s not like there’s anything I can do to stop it. We might as well use it to our advantage, right?”

            “What, and start a whole other reign of terror just like the First Order’s? No!! We can’t use fear as a weapon, it’s _wrong!”_

            Rey feels a guilty prickling in her throat. She looks once at the captured storm troopers, at the looks on their faces, and begins to realize what he means. She was _using_ them, controlling them with fear just like the First Order does. It is now that she realizes that she still hasn’t learned how _very_ thin the line is between the Resistance and the First Order is.

            Finn turns to the troopers and sighs.

            “Look,” he begins, “I’ve been where you are. I was a storm trooper too, and I defected. It was frightening. I thought the First Order was my entire life. But now that I’ve gotten away from them, I know what they really are. Think about it. The First Order ripped you away from a family you don’t even remember when you were babies, brainwashed you to comply, and molded you into pawns for them to throw away. You’ve been used your entire life. But now, for the first time, you have a choice.”

            He stands up and looks over them. The woman who was tazed- the officer- is silently weeping as the truth of his words cut her to the core. The other two look shell-shocked.

            “The First Order told me to kill for them, and I said _no._ I used to think there was nowhere I could go where the Order wouldn’t find me. I thought I’d have to go into exile. But there _is_ one place. The Resistance is not your enemy. I made a family and a home there, and so can you. I found love-”

            He glances at Rose, who blushes,

            “-I found real friends-”

            He looks at Rey, who she smiles, relieved that he still thinks of her as a friend,

            “-And I found a cause I could _really_ fight for, and believe in. What has the Order ever given you to fight for? When have they ever treated you like people, who deserve lives and the chance to live them?”

            There is silence, broken only by the soft sobs of the woman officer. Finn looks down at his feet, and the onlookers watch him, fascinated and solemn.

            “Whatever you have done,” Finn says at length, “Whatever you were before- the Resistance will give you a full pardon, for what little it means, anyway.”

            Rey edges forward before he can continue and touches his arm.

            “Finn, you can’t promise that, I don’t know if I can-”

            He turns on her with bared teeth and says again, louder,

            “We _will_ pardon you.”

            And in his eyes Rey saw the clear message:

            _For all that you’ve done, for all that you owe me, you could at least do me this._

Rey just nods and steps back. He addresses the troopers again.

            “…The Resistance is willing to take you in. I don’t know on what terms exactly, but… if they could take me, they’ll take you. But we won’t force you to either. If you want, we’ll turn you loose at the next jump point. You have a choice. You can go back with your tail between your legs and hope the First Order will forgive you. Or you can refuse to kill for the First Order. You can say _‘no’._ You can try to make a real difference in the galaxy, for once. You can keep hope alive. It’s up to you.”

            Poe, who’s been listening through the comms, interjects-

            _“Whichever one they pick, they better do it fast. We’re two minutes out from the second jump point. It’s now or never, kids.”_

The four troopers look at each other, then back at Finn. Tentatively, the woman officer nods. She sniffs hard and says in a tremulous voice,

            “W-we’ll join you.”


	6. In dreams

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which the Force does a whole lot of Confusing Shit ™ to our two beloved mains.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh boy, I intended this to be a slow-burn but I didn’t think it’d end up being this slow-burn. Man, these guys have so much emotional baggage to sort out before they can have a healthy fucking relationship, it’s gonna take me eons to get through it all. (I promise I’ll try not to take eons, but this is shaping up to be a long one, folks.) Anyway, here's a Kylo-heavy chapter to make up for the Lack Of Kylo in the previous one. I'm ramping up for some serious action, so get ready!
> 
> Also, THANK YOU ALL AND BLESS YOU FOR THE ENCOURAGEMENT! I seriously doubt I'd still be going on this fic if not for all your kind words! I do this all for you guys and you are just the best.

* * *

           

            It’s a hard time, convincing Avix to admit the defectors. But Rey fights the good fight. Halsey, of course, sides with Rey. She usually does, if Rey can provide a good logical and tactical argument. Avix is the one who takes emotional convincing. As Halsey says- ‘his head’s too hard, so you’ve gotta go for the heart and hope for the best’.

            The entire raid party is there, putting in good words where they can. Poe, Rose, and BB-8 are a bit too enthusiastic, so Rey has to step on their feet or kick BB-8’s ball to shut them up before their outbursts ruin the debate. Finn uses the ‘you accepted me, you can accept them’ argument. Poe personally vouches for how helpful the four troopers were in the mission. Quarhara, Meeran, and Nashaala all volunteer to keep an eye on them, just for safety’s sake. Turr’Ra says nothing, but his lack of objection is a statement in and of itself. Avix is, as usual, outnumbered by Halsey and Rey’s combined might. He caves, under the condition that the defectors be kept in confinement for at least one full week to make sure they harbor no ill intent.

            Finn hugs Rey later, after the four troopers have been changed out of their uniforms, fed, watered, bathed, and locked up in the basement cells (which used to be secure storage rooms for smuggled cargo, but work well enough as detainment cells). He hugs her and says,

            “Thank you for that. It means a lot to me.”

            Rey holds him tight, smiling to herself.

            “Of course, Finn. You know you only ever have to ask.”

            They part at last, and Rey bids him goodbye. He stays there in the basement levels to talk to the four new Resistance members. They still call themselves and each other by their identification numbers, and they’ll need help picking names for themselves. Rey, still grinning, still glowing with the day’s victories, makes her way back up towards the surface.

            Tharuss’s icy sun is setting. She can no longer exit the base through the mountaintop hatch. The passage to it has been sealed ever since her unfortunate encounter with the Force-sucking worm that almost killed her. There’s a plasma shield over the hole in the wall, but just in case, the Resistance has kept the flood doors tight-shut. So if she wants to get to the natural stone platform on top of the mountain, she has to go out the launch bay doors and climb the mountain face.

            She slings her staff over her back, tightens the laces of her boots, and (when no one is looking) pulls herself up and out. Sea spray lashes every exposed piece of skin on her body as she digs her cold, half-numb fingers into rock crevices. She loves every second of it. She trusts in the Force, and her soul sings with every sigh of the wind around her. She is alive.

            She reaches the top of the mountain, scrambles over the edge, and sucks in the cold air like she wants to get drunk on it. This world is alien and hard and unfamiliar, and the chill will settle into her bones soon enough. She won’t like it so much then. But for now, she’s been cooped up in a cockpit and then an office for too long. She already misses the exhilaration of the mission she just completed. She misses the rush. She needs to move, needs to work, needs to be in the open air with nothing over her head. She’ll never be able to sleep if she doesn’t release all this pent-up energy now.

Rey un-slings her staff and starts going through the motions, whipping it above and around her in deadly, hissing arcs. She feels a bit like a sea serpent herself. It’s a bit like it was on Ahch-To, up here, though she’s missing a proper lightsaber. Her feet stamp in time with the pounding waves below. The savage rhythm begins to raise pebbles and rocks from the ground around her as her body and mind slip closer and closer in tune with the Cosmic Force around her, and it’s like a kind of meditation, this shadow-sparring-

            -Until Kylo Ren shatters everything.

Rey whirls around, bringing her staff up and around in a wicked back-handed swing, and hears a startled yelp behind her. The metal rod jars right out of her fingers when it collides with a stiff resistance where she expected none, and that’s it. The pebbles fall, the staff clatters to the ground, the spell is broken. Suddenly the world has gone silent, and all she can sense is him. Her moment of harmony is gone.

            Kylo doesn’t even have the decency to look guilty when she turns around to glare at him. She forgot about his little field trip to Jakku, until now. Now, the annoyance floods back into her.

Kylo must be somewhere dim, because the slanted purple light of sunset looks like it’s streaming right through him. He’s holding a practice-saber not unlike the one she uses, though his has the distinctive cross-guard built in. He’s just got a tank top, suspenders, and the usual black trousers on. Rey’s never seen his hair like this- it’s been tied back at the crown of his head, so she can see all of his face. Sweat gleams in the crevices of his arms and shoulders- it’s obvious that he, like her, was in the middle of practicing when the Force Bond interrupted.

            “You were there, weren’t you!” she accuses, without preamble. All of a sudden she’s right up in his personal space, her face warped into a half-snarl. He just looks down his nose at her, his dark eyes hooded.

            “Where?” he asks, though he knows very well what she means, and she knows he knows.

            “Jakku! You went to Niima Outpost and then to my old home, without even asking!”

            “Last I checked, Jakku was a part of my Empire. And you should know better than most- _no one_ owns the desert.”

            And now he can’t hide it- he can never hide from her- the images are flashing out through the Bond. But to her surprise, she realizes that he’s not trying to hide them anymore. He’s had some time to think about what he did, and what her reactions would be, and he’s completely caught her off-guard. He’s _offering_ her the memories to examine: the feeling of Niima’s ash crunching under his boots, the rotten tang of Unkar Plutt’s blood, the sickening _squelch_ of his body imploding, the metal panel of the AT-AT crumpling under Kylo’s fist-

            Rey takes a step back. She is shaking, her eyes are wide. He just flashes her a small, satisfied smirk. Like he’s given her a gift. He would have brought Plutt’s severed arm with him and given it to her if he could, like a hunter returning with a trophy. Rey opens her mouth to yell, to scream, to declare how not-okay that was and how truly incensed she is, but then blinks, and closes her lips into a thin line. She realizes all of a sudden:

            She’s not _actually_ angry anymore.

            She was mad at first not because of what she thought he’d done, but because he tried to hide it from her. She was angry with the lie- not the actions themselves. The longer he looks at her like that, the more she stops to think about it, the more she realizes that she shares his savage exultation. Niima is a pile of rubble. Plutt can never hurt her again. He died in agony. He is dead, little more than a memory, while she lives on. And Kylo gave that to her.

            _Be angry!_ Screams the small voice that lives where Master Luke used to be, in her mind. _Be angry at him! Be outraged for the deaths he caused! Or at least feel guilty for not being angry! At least recognize that it’s wrong to feel this joy!_

But then again, is she supposed to be angry just because it’s Kylo? She wouldn’t be angry at herself for doing any of those things. She wouldn’t feel guilt either. So why should she now?

            Rey glances at Kylo and mutters half-heartedly,

            “You shouldn’t have done that, Ben. You destroyed the livelihoods of a lot of people when you burnt Niima down.”

            “Whatever helps you sleep,” he scoffs. His practice-saber swings once, loose and fluid, the motion circling out from the wrist. He is thinking,

_They deserved what they got. They deserved to be ruined the way they tried to ruin you. You matter, Rey, and they don’t. You are more important, more unique, and more precious than the collective worth of every filthy scrap trader on that rock._

Rey flushes from her neck to her hears. Kylo is still glowing in the knowledge that he was right- that she _did_ relish Plutt’s death like he thought she would. She wants to wipe the smug look off his face _._ She knows she ought to tell him that he’s wrong, that her life is worth no more and no less than any other life in the galaxy. But it feels too good to be thought about that way, to be told that she’s valuable. The conflict between what she knows is right and what she feels deep in her bones is making her heart race.

Before she knows it, the pair of them are circling each other on top of the mountain. They pace in predatory arcs.

“You look upset,” Kylo mocks, again making circles through the air with his practice-saber, “Is there something you want to say to me?”

            “You’re insufferable,” she spits.

            “That’s not what you said last time we talked,” comes his cutting reply. And there it is again- the smirk. Not quite a smile, not quite a sneer. Infuriating.

            “Don’t _look_ at me like that!” Rey growls, taking a swing at him with her staff. The two weapons come together with a ringing _clack,_ and the impact jars right up Rey’s arms and into her chest. The feeling is satisfying, though Kylo is still leering at her.

            “Like what?” he asks, half-breathless, as he finishes the parry motion and comes in for a riposte. She takes a step backward and ducks under his practice-weapon, passes the staff behind her back, and whirls it over her head for a vicious overhead blow. He must seize his weapon by the handle with two hands in order to stop it. Rey’s body is already preparing the counter for when he’ll try to snatch her staff away, but to her surprise, he twists his own saber over his head, catches the staff in the crossguard, and sweeps it away from his body. Then he spins in place and goes in for the backhand, with all the grace of a striking Vornskr. Rey is less artful- she swats the saber aside and starts going for the debilitating throat-and-sternum strikes that she favors.

            They lose the thread of conversation in the flashing of the two weapons. They battle back and forth until the Tharuss sun is so low that its light is little more than a dull purple glow. The longer they’re at it, the more Rey feels like something in her chest is swelling with an emotion she can’t place. She and Kylo are fit to burst with it. They are practically breathing in sync.

Rey realizes eventually that Kylo is treated Rey’s staff like he would treat the blade of a lightsaber. Whether the choice is conscious or not is unclear, but he is making an obvious effort not to let the staff touch him, the same way he would with a saber. Rey, for her turn, can practically hear the crackling scream of his ragged red plasma blade. The line between reality and memory blurs more and more the lower the sun gets, until she can’t remember if she’s on Tharuss or if she’s back in the dim, snowy labyrinth of the forests on Starkiller base. Rey’s heart races.

Finally, when there’s no light left and the pair of them have beat each other to a standstill, Rey and Kylo find themselves in a blade-lock. Kylo is larger and stronger, but Rey has more leverage with her longer weapon, and the tip of the staff is right next to his neck. If he pushes any further, she’ll have space to pivot and drive the imaginary saber-staff into his jugular. Right now, however, she doesn’t have room to move. He has her weapon well and truly pinned, and if she tries to withdraw from the lock, he’ll come down on her hands. So they stand there, panting and sweating, too weary to struggle any longer but too stubborn to give in.

Eventually, Kylo huffs once in an approximation of a laugh.

“Feel better now?”

“I’d feel better if I actually got you,” Rey growls. It’s true- neither of them landed a single hit, not in the entire sparring match.

“You already got me twice, remember?” he replies, softer now. He turns his head to the side a little to indicate the diagonal scar on his face. Then there’s the other, circular scar on his shoulder, where she jabbed him before.

Finally, Rey sighs and eases up. She hates to see those scars that she gave him in anger, hates when he looks at her so softly when he ought to be bitter over it. So she takes a step back, conceding. She realizes as she lowers her staff that her arms are shaking from the strain of battling him so hard. He doesn’t appear to be in much better shape.

“I guess that means I owe you a couple of free shots, don’t I?” she retorts. He just glances down at the exposed curve of her shoulder where her new scar shows, then back up at her eyes.

“I suppose we can count that as one,” he murmurs, and there is a surprising hint of regret in his voice. She is taken aback.

“W-what, this? This isn’t your fault,” she stammers.

“Maybe not directly. But we were supposed to be watching out for each other. I let that happen to you.”

She insists quietly, “It’s not a big deal.”

“Maybe not to you,” Kylo sighs in reply. How they could go from intense sparring to this solemn whispering in the space of a minute, Rey couldn’t fathom. That’s Kylo all over, that contradiction. She just wishes he wouldn’t speak to her like that. Like he feels responsible for her being hurt, and the thought pains him.

 _Like he cares,_ whispers her contentious mind.

The realization hits her so suddenly, she gets whiplash. For all the messed-up shit that’s happened since they met, Kylo cares about her, in his own broken way. She doesn’t know how she didn’t see it before. All of a sudden, his actions ever since the Battle of Crait make so much more sense. Even Crait starts to make sense. He was angry because he was hurt. He was hurt because she was angry, and because he cares. And though he’s still trying to be what everyone expects him to be- the Supreme Leader- he doesn’t care nearly enough about that, compared to Rey.

 _And do I care too?_ she wonders, in the deepest, most private recesses of her mind.

They stare for a few seconds, neither knowing what to say, or how to word what they want to say, or even if they want to say it at all. For all that they try, their eyes alone cannot get the message across.

Before Rey knows it, the connection winks out of existence, and she is left to stare in confusion at the place where Kylo was. There is a pang across the Bond- his simultaneous confusion and disappointment- then nothing.

She’s not sure if she wants to weep, or fling her staff into the beating waves out of impotent anger.

…

            By the time Kylo sees Rey again several weeks later, there have been four more base raids and three hijacked First Order transports. It appears that Rey’s enthusiastic retaliation for Jakku includes multiple counts of grand theft and Larson. It’s not a huge inconvenience- the First Order’s resources are as expansive as the galaxy itself- but the increased Resistance activity stirs up unease in the ranks.

Hux seems to take a special pleasure in shooting overly meaningful glances at Kylo across the table during the reports on these attacks. Kylo’s advisors take turns briefing him on various aspects of his reign. He listens impassively, only speaking to give a necessary directive or deny/ approve a proposal. Most of the previous meetings have been about the expansion efforts, but this one seems to feature Resistance activity much more heavily than before. Of course, he knows of what’s been going on much the same way that Rey knew about his trip to Jakku. He just knows. And frankly, he gives fewer and fewer shits the longer his advisors posture and prattle about it.

            He resolutely ignores Hux’s silent needling. The only sign of his mild annoyance is his finger, tapping against the knuckle of his other hand, which is folded under his nose as he listens to the officer who’s replaced Phasma. The woman is equally tall and imposing as Phasma once was, but she is swarthy, and has kinky black hair that she trims short to fit under the helmet. Her deep voice commands the attention of the entire room.

            “It’s difficult to get exact numbers on how many troops have defected and how many are simply missing,” the silver-clad woman, who’s name is Marogon, begins. She highlights different points on the glowing holo-map as she explains, “Resistance activity has been confirmed in the Outer Rim all the way from Hutt Space to Endor. There have even been alleged sightings in the Mid Rim, though no confirmable action has been taken that we can see thus far. We’re assuming for now that any troop disappearances in this area are defections. Two of the recent hijackings happened near Hutt Space, but the third was a priority shipment coming into Kinyen from the Unknown Regions. This shipment’s location and even its existence was classified, but the Resistance knew where to strike anyway, and got away unscathed. Inquiries to its location have turned up nothing. They appeared to have had inside help on that job, sir, which is just another example of what a problem these defectors are becoming. From our estimates, anywhere from twenty-five to sixty storm troopers have defected to the Resistance cause, much the way FN-2187 did. This number is small for now, but the more our troops come into contact with Resistance fighters like Rey of Jakku and FN-2187, the more likely they are to turn. The programming has experienced a weakening in morale. Crackdowns on loyalty tests and discipline have helped, but it’s impossible to tell exactly how far into our ranks the dissension has spread. Many of our troops fear the Jedi girl, and not without good reason.”

            At mention of the Jedi girl, Hux looks at Ren again. Kylo can feel his gaze, and hear his dissatisfaction quite clearly. He keeps staring forward.

            “Furthermore, there have been reports on the aforementioned Jedi stating that she’s personally appeared in many of these raids-”

            _That sounds about right,_ Kylo thinks, _She’s not one to sit back and watch._

“-And that she has somehow obtained a lightsaber.”

            Kylo unfolds his hands and sits up straighter at this. It’s all he can do not to flip the table.

            “She _what?”_ he growls. The officer pauses as if considering her words.

            “….She’s obtained a lightsaber, sir.”

“Explain,” says the Supreme Leader through gritted teeth, gripping the armrests of his seat hard. “I want details. What color is the blade. What type of weapon is it fashioned as. How did she obtain the kyber crystal for it.”

            “Reports vary, sir,” Marogon replies evenly, as if purposefully ignoring his agitation. “We believe that she obtained the crystals from the priority shipment. It contained a variety of experimental crystal varieties that we were bringing in from the Unknown Regions. Some say she uses a double-bladed saber-staff. Others say that she uses two separate blades. There’s even one report of her using two separate, very small blades, the size of longknives. But these blades are said to be transparent and soundless, which is why we’ve discounted such reports as impossible fantasies-”

            “No,” Kylo interrupts, “It’s possible. If there were Ghostfire crystals on the shipment, she may have bent them into lightsaber crystals. What about the other weapon or weapons? What color are they?”

            “Well that’s the only thing that’s consistent sir. All reports say that both blades (besides the Ghostfire ones, that is) are violet.”

            “Violet…” he repeats softly, to himself. “Anything else? Is there anything on the quality of the blades? How long ago did she aquire them?”

            “They were first seen on the second base raid, approximately eight star-days after they hijacked the crystal shipment. She reportedly used them to carve an entrance into the wall of the base… through six solid inches of titanium-chromium alloy. It’s said that she cut through the wall like it was cheese. In addition, when she deflected a blaster-bolt with it, the ricocheted bolt hit a deployed AT-HS and… and punctured the armor on its engine compartment. The entire crew died in the explosion.”

            At this, Hux shifts nervously in his seat. His brows clash together in a deep frown.

            “A mere blaster bolt?! Impossible!” he exclaims.

            “…Maybe she’s using Etaan crystal… ,” Kylo murmurs under his breath. “No, there wouldn’t be any of it on a shipment from the Unknown Regions. Even Etaan isn’t that powerful… The only thing that could produce such an effect… Could she be…?”

            “Supreme Leader, what are you thinking?” Hux prompts. Kylo is silent for a moment. At length, he says to the assembly-

            “Now this is just a theory, but if the hijacked shipment contained sensitive materials from the Kybarra base beyond Ilum, she may very well have learned how to bend the crystal’s will to her own. She may have cannibalized the pieces from the lightsaber she stole and created a new weapon with a new crystal.”

            A dark muttering runs around the length of the table.

            “Kybarra? What’s that?” asks Ltn. Mitaka, who is currently serving as Hux’s assistant. The Lieutenant has been standing behind Hux’s chair this whole time, largely silent until now.

            Hux glances around at present company to make sure there is no one present besides Mitaka who isn’t already privy to the information he’s about to share. When he’s certain that it’s safe, the General nods to himself and then explains-

            “One of our most top-secret projects is the Kybarra research base, also known as Project # 92. Kyber crystals, and other similar focusing agents, were used in the construction of both Starkiller base and its predecessors, the Death Stars. Kyber is the most common focusing and energy-producing crystal. Its two biggest producers were Jedha and Ilum, but both planets have been mined out almost completely. Because of the shortage and over-use of Kyber, the First Order’s high command has been looking into alternative crystals. Ghostfire is just one of many that we’ve been researching. However, in the Unknown Regions even farther beyond Ilum, our surveying teams recently discovered a planet whose core is almost entirely constructed of a new, previously undiscovered type of crystal. The new variety shares a structure and several of its properties with kyber, but it has the potential to be many times as powerful. We established a research base on the planet in the past year and have been studying the crystal ever since. They dubbed it Kybarra, and the planet was named the same.”

            “It is my opinion,” Kylo adds, “that the Project #92’s attempts to use the kybarra in conventional weaponry will bear little fruit. From what I’ve read of the lab reports thus far, it is extremely Force-Sensitive in a way that far outpaces the token Force-Sensitivity of kyber. It borders on sentience. I doubt it will respond to just any user.”

            Hux grits his teeth, and Kylo can feel the resentment pouring off of him in waves. Hux is just _too easy_ to read. The General says in a voice barely kept civil,

            “All due respect, Supreme Leader, but your insistence on tying your arcane, obsolete religion into our _scientific_ research is-”

            “I think it’s time you understood something about my ‘arcane religion’, General Hux,” Kylo interrupts. He stands from his seat, unfurling in his full height at the head of the war room table. He glances at Mitaka, who flinches when the Supreme Leader’s dark eyes fall on him. Kylo unhooks his lightsaber from his belt and tosses it to the young Lieutenant, who clumsily catches the thing.

            “Ignite it, Lieutenant. Go ahead- try it.”

            The young man glances around in confusion. But he takes a step back from the table and does so. The toothy red blade comes screaming to life. The low, angry growl makes everyone but Kylo jump in place, including Mitaka. He almost drops the thing. He keeps a hold of it, but just barely. Instead, the blade swings in his hand and accidentally hacks off the corner of Kylo’s chair. The Supreme Leader just sways slightly to avoid getting his ear chopped off. Mitaka squeaks and brings it back upward, terrified of severing someone’s limb. The thing seems to jump around like it has a life of its own. Kylo, unfazed, asks the young man-

            “Well? What do you observe about the weapon, Lieutenant?”

            “I-it’s weightless, sir,” the young man stammers, halfway between terror and awe.

            “Yes. The gyroscopic effect of a plasma blade is unmanageable in the untrained hands, and extremely dangerous to wield. But in the hands of a Force-Sensitive-”

            Kylo extends a hand for the weapon. The saber rights itself and drifts calmly over, where he takes it from the air. Then he finishes-

            “-The lightsaber is the most formidable weapon in the galaxy.

            He turns the thing upside down with a flick of the wrist, and very slowly, deliberately, drives it down through the transparisteel table. It melts hole in the table, right up until it hits the crossguard. It halts there, and Kylo lets the watchers appreciate the effect for a moment before he releases the switch. The saber hisses out of existence, and the handle clatters back down on the table, innocent and innocuous. The molten metal cools, leaving behind the clean, circular hole he burned in the transparisteel.

            “The Force is very real, General Hux. And part of what makes the lightsaber so deadly-,” Kylo explains, “-is the Force-Sensitivity of the user. It takes enhanced strength, speed, reflexes, and coordination to use the blade without hurting oneself. So yes, in a way General, you are correct. The lightsaber is obsolete in this galaxy where most people cannot use anything more complex than a blaster. But for those of us who can successfully wield a lightsaber, no other weapon is its equal.

            The kyber crystal is the heart of the weapon,” Kylo continues. He extends his hand to the saber and lifts it with the Force, levitating it for the assembly to see. The screws and panels come apart and drift aside, exposing the inner workings of the weapon, right down to the glowing, blood-red crystal within. There is a jagged crack in it, like a dark vein. Kylo holds this position so everyone can see what he’s talking about.

            “Kyber crystals are transparent when they are first harvested. My own crystal was taken from a small cache on Yavin 4, under the ancient temples where Luke Skywalker attempted to re-start the Jedi Order. The apprentices there were encouraged to harvest and cut their own crystals, much the same way the pre-purge Order did. Cutting kyber crystals enhances their focusing power to some degree, but their real potential comes from the Force. If they are used in conventional weaponry, as they were with Starkiller base, they remain transparent. Most of their potential power goes to waist as well. When a Force-user meditates with a crystal, however, he forms a bond with it. The crystal takes on a color that suits the person’s personality, and its full potential is realized. The Jedi and the Sith used kyber in this way for eons, and many societies revered it for its Force-sensitive properties. Ilum and Jedha were sacred places, places of history and tradition, before their destruction at the hands of the Empire.

            There are other crystals with similar effects, though they are rare and difficult to use. Many Sith preferred synthetic crystals because they were more powerful, though less stable. It is said that on rare occasions, synth crystals have been strong enough to ‘break’ the blade of an ordinary kyber lightsaber. Then there is Ghostfire, which produces no color and no sound, leaving behind only an after-image. There is Permafrost Crystal which creates a cold blade, Krayt Dragon Pearl which is taken from the throats of desert beasts, Etaan which echoes the sound around it and amplifies the power of whatever it touches, Windu’s Guile which was named after the Jedi Master Mace Windu, Adegan which produces a Force Signature of its own- I could go on and on. Each is unique. Each can be used as a focus point for the Force. Each is sensitive to the Force, though none are exactly like kyber in that respect.

            Kybarra crystal, however- kybarra appears to be different from any other known crystal. I have not yet seen one, but I’ve been keeping close track of the research sent by Project # 92. The researchers say they can’t get consistent results on the power readings because the crystal reacts differently to each person who handles it. Some readings are frankly terrifying- enough power to incinerate the Hosnian system ten times over. Others are laughable. Two wildly different power readings can be taken from the same crystal in one day. It’s been known to flush with different colors at different times for no apparent reason, then fade back to transparency. The crystal itself glows to varying degrees, and pulses like it has a heartbeat. Sometimes the separate crystals react in sync with one another as one whole, and sometimes they react individually. The only explanation I can think of is that the crystal is so extremely in tune with the Cosmic Force that it acts under its own volition, its own sentience. Something that Force-sensitive… something that powerful… I cannot imagine what kind of potential it could have as the heart of a lightsaber.

            If the Jedi girl’s new weapon is strong enough to cut through six inches of titanium alloy and turn blaster-bolts into explosive projectiles, she and the Resistance may very well have acquired a supply of Kybarra. The secrecy of Project # 92 may also have been compromised. If they should learn of its properties and somehow figure out a way to manipulate it, their threat level will increase a great deal.”

            The assembly waits until Kylo is finished. The handle of his lightsaber re-assembles itself in midair. His hand closes on it and he hooks in back on his belt before resuming his seat. Some are staring in faint wonder: this is probably the most they’ve ever heard him say all at once, and the things he has revealed are wondrous indeed. But Hux is just working his jaw back and forth, his fox-like eyes narrowed in concentration. At length, he takes a deep breath and says-

            “Thank you for that...  _enlightening_ display, Supreme Leader. It’s clear that we must locate and retrieve this crystal shipment with all haste. The question is _how._ The rebel scum have kept their location and operations a secret from us so far, so if we are to take any action against them, we must draw them out.”

            “Well uh, uh… a-assuming that they know about the kybarra and Project # 92, we could set up a trap with a second shipment of crystals,” the Mitaka suggests, his voice stuttering and shy.

            “Just what I was thinking, Lieutenant,” Hux purrs,  low and scheming. Mitaka flushes triumphantly at the praise, oblivious to the General’s sly half-smile. “We could arrange for a second shipment of kybarra and other various crystals- smaller this time, but enough to pique their interest. Then we could leak information on the shipment’s route to a few of the right people. That will give us time to prepare a suitable ambush. Given our superior numbers and the might of our fleet, it shouldn’t be difficult to overwhelm and capture them once they reveal themselves. We can torture the information we need out of them. Or of course, if our Supreme Leader deems fit, he could put his mysterious ‘Force’ to good use for us, and simply _take_ the information we need. What does our exalted leader think?”

            And Hux glances at Kylo, whose finger is tapping absentmindedly again. He agrees with Hux for once on the point that the Kybarra has to be retrieved. It has no place in the hands of the rebel scum who can’t make good use of it anyway. But he worries that an ambush of this nature could put Rey in danger. He only has a few seconds to weigh his options. Agree to setting a trap, and risk Rey’s safety. Shoot the idea down, and risk his own public image, his esteem in the eyes of his advisors. Or…

            He clears his throat and nods once, his head bowing regally in Hux’s direction. On the inside, he is positively simmering with resentment.

            “A solid idea, General. Put it in motion. I want updates on the details of your plan as it takes shape.”

            Hux smothers a triumphant grin. After that, the meeting returns to the subject of damage reports and progress checks on the conquering front. Kylo zones out for most of this, except to nod or shake his head where necessary.

            _I’ll just warn Rey ahead of time,_ he thinks. _I’ll never convince her not to take the bait, but maybe I can get her to stay out of it. Let someone else do it, let someone else be captured… No, she’ll never agree to that. She’ll want to go and do it herself. Well maybe I can help make sure she escapes unscathed, if I get personally involved. That’s it, I’ll just have to insist on being present for the ambush. It shouldn’t be too hard to insert myself into the workings…_

…

The meeting takes far too long to close, in his opinion. His advisors are a long-winded bunch who enjoy vying for his approval. He finds the whole business tiring and petty. He is beginning to understand why Snoke delegated most of his duties as Supreme Leader, rather than taking the hands-on approach Kylo is trying to take. By the time everyone has said what needs to be said, the only thing Kylo wants is a shot of something strong and a nap. Preferably something really, really, _really_ strong, so he’ll fall asleep and stay asleep for once. His schedule is blessedly clear for the rest of this evening, meaning he can go to bed early in conscience.

            Kylo unclips his Ursod-fur cape and swings it from his shoulders as he strides down the corridors towards his own quarters. The collar of his red-and-gold embroidered tunic chafes. He tugs on it with one finger, then unbuttons the top lapel. The rich outfits he’s obligated to wear to these meetings always seem to chafe worse than his normal, more sedate attire. He’s still managed to keep black as his primary wardrobe color, but nothing less than princely finery will do for the Supreme Leader when he appears in his public capacity. He doesn’t hate it, but it’s not his favorite either.

            He’s paused at the corner next to a rampway to fold up his cape when something… _odd_ distracts him. A whisper. A ripple. A pulse. He looks up, startled, as if he’s heard something and is looking for the source of the sound. But the corridor is empty except for a pair of storm troopers down at the opposite end, on patrol. They’re too far away for him to hear them, but then again, he hasn’t actually _heard_ anything. Just felt it. Kylo gives himself a shake and then heads up the ramp, glaring down at the floor ahead of him. His own face undulates in the mirror-like surface. It looks confused, if warped.

            He’s had premonitions before. The Force has communed with him in many ways, from the moment he was born. Sometimes it made him feel gifted; at other times, cursed. But never has it felt like this. Never has if felt like… like someone speaking to him. The way the Force Bond does: not in words, but deep in the soul. Only this isn’t Rey. It’s something deeper and slower, like the movement of the galaxy itself. Like the Force itself has found a voice and is speaking to him in a language he can’t understand.

            He is relieved to reach the safety of his own quarters, and close the door behind him. He is unsettled, to say the least. The first thing he does is strip off the embroidered tunic, shed his boots, and unbuckle the wide silver-clasped belt. Then he presses the service comm. The microphone buzzes a tiny bit as the droid answers him, and he makes a mental note to put in a work order on that.

            _“ZZT- Yes, Supreme Leader?”_

“Send a half dose of oral Benzodi and a pot of Gatalentaen tea direct to my quarters, please.”

            _“ZZT- Sir, are you sure you wouldn’t like a few Sleeptabs or dose of Dipill? Benzodi is typically used as tranquilizer.”_

Kylo hesitates, releases the button, then presses it again.

            “The uh… the Sleeptabs stopped working awhile ago. And Dipill has side effects I’d… rather avoid.”

            _“ZZT- Ah, yes! The rare Nightmare effect. My apologies, sir. Your Benzodi and your tea are on their way.”_

Kylo releases the button so that the droid won’t hear and mutters,

            “Not so rare in my case…”

            A few minutes later there’s a cheery _ding!_ at the door of his quarters.

            “Enter,” Kylo calls, flipping the switch on the wall to unlock it. The door hisses open and the guards outside step aside to let the service droid pass. It gives a startled beep when it sees the mess of his clothes on the floor, which he hasn’t yet bothered to put in the laundry chute. It whirrs towards the mess, but Kylo just snatches the tray from its mechanical arm and gives it a bad-tempered kick.

            “Leave it, just- leave it! Get out!”

            The droid obediently whirrs back out, nearly running into one of the guards on its way. Kylo sees one of them aim another kick at it before the doors hiss shut.

            He downs the vial in one go, wrinkling his nose at the bitter, chemical taste of it. He kicks the dirty clothes into a slightly neater pile at the foot of his bed. Then he drops the vial on top of it and turns to the tea. He ought to drink something- tranquilizers always leave him parched. There’s a thermos-pot, but no cup. In hindsight, he never explicitly asked for a cup to come with the pot. Kylo rolls his eyes and thinks,

            _Droids. Useless._

Thankfully, it’s a thermos-pot with a lid and a rim he can still drink from. He takes it into the bed with him and sips gingerly, since it’s still steaming. His stomach roils when the hot liquid hits it, since the tea is the only thing he’s had all day. Forgetting to eat and drink is easy when there’s so much on his mind.

            He gets a few mouthfuls down before the half-dose hits him. He has just enough time to lid up the pot and set it on his bedside before his vision goes blurry. He sinks into the plush mattress and half-heartedly throws the sheet over himself, and then he is lost to the waking world.

…

            _Ben… Ben… Ben Solo…_

_Come home, Ben. Come home…_

_Ben._

_Ben!_

_Ben…_

_There are voices calling his other name, and they echo as if they come from a great distance. Kylo feels like he’s underwater- an endless, dark, cool well with no bottom and no upper world to swim to. He feels no fear of it, no need to escape. He just floats, and listens in a confused sort of wonder. Part of him is trying not to listen, but the other part is automatically trying to pick the voices apart, with our without his conscious consent._

_In time, he recognizes one as Luke._

_“I did say I’d see you around. I wasn’t joking… I am with you. I am with you always.”_

_He doesn’t remember his uncle ever saying these exact words. So they’re not memories. But the sound is too clear, and to accurate, to be his imagination either. Or is it?_

_Repeating his other name in the background is his mother’s voice. His mother as he last saw and heard her, before she died. It’s like she cannot or will not say anything more than his name, but there is such love and tenderness in that one syllable. He gets the same feeling from her voice as he gets from Luke’s. The feeling that she’s_ there, _though he cannot see or touch her._

_And then… and then there is a voice he does not recognize no matter how he tries to place it. It’s male, and reminds him vaguely of Luke, though it’s not Luke. He can’t even make out the words, but the tone of the voice is urgent and hushed. It makes him want to listen, past his uncle and mother, deeper and deeper into the well…_

Kylo jerks awake, drenched in cold sweat.

            _What,_ he thinks, _in the nine hells was that?_

The empty room and the ticking holochron have no answers to give him.


	7. Penmanship

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Rey and Kylo formulate a plan, though how long it remains secret is yet to be seen.
> 
> Find the corresponding illustration for this chapter here:
> 
> https://iputthepaininpainting.tumblr.com/post/177919784192/chapter-7-of-blue-star-is-up-and-running-bitches

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yikes, sorry it took so long to get this chapter finished and posted! I had a crazy summer, working 40 hours a week just about every week. You can imagine how relaxing that was. Then the new semester started and only now are things FINALLY settling in. I've found some time to write though, so hopefully I'll be able to get a new chapter up every couple of weeks. Maybe the length of this chapter will make up for the long wait, I hope. It's a few pages more than some of my previous ones.
> 
> (Also- I'm not gonna bother going through and fixing the tab formatting. Idfk why it does that, but I'm not about to spend an hour of my life going through and re-aligning every paragraph. So enjoy the uneven formatting.)

The sun over the planet of Near Pando is so distant that even at high noon, the land is swathed in ominous half-shadow. Most of the planet’s warmth comes from the core, which vents heat into the atmosphere in the form of steam. The resulting thick fog only further obscures the surroundings, turning the temperate forest into a labyrinth of dim shapes. Now that the faraway sun is setting, a campfire sheds most of the light over the Malabar Construct. The shadows amongst the ruined towers and crumbling marble walls waver and sway with a life of their own.

Rey and Meeran sit by the campfire and eye the ruins warily. They seem to be feeling the eerie effect more deeply than Poe and Qarhara, who are in the middle of an intense game of holo-chess. The boys decided to up the stakes by betting on the winner, and Qarhara is currently destroying Poe. The pilot is playing black while the young Togorian plays white. The black queen, two rooks, one knight, and most of the pawns are all tallied up on Qarhara’s side. Poe is  trying, and failing, to get one of his few remaining pawns across to the other side of the board so that he can reclaim his queen. Their muttered curses and exclamations of victory or defeat are too loud in the otherwise-silent night. There are no birds or small animals amongst the ruins of the Malabar Construct, though the rest of the forest teems with them. The lack of natural noise is chilling.

            Rey wants to tell them to pack it away and go to sleep, since they have an infiltration/ mission tomorrow and they’ll have to get started early. But this is the first time in days that they’ve been able to relax, since they’ve been tailing the target through populated areas for most of the mission. It’s exhausting to be always on the guard like this. Now that they know where the target is headed, the idea is for them to hunker down in an abandoned place and unwind a bit before the final push.

            Or at least, Qarhara and Poe can unwind. Rey is tense; she doesn’t like it here. She wishes the small group could have taken shelter anywhere _but_ the mysterious ruins of the Malabar Construct. If it weren’t for the predicted thunderstorm later that night, she would pack them all up and shunt their camp out into the forest beyond. At least the forest doesn’t put her nerves on edge.

            Meeran feels it too. She’s not as talkative as her brother in general, but her silence is heavier than usual. She and Rey sit side-by-side and watch the others playing. The tip of Meeran’s tail twitches back and forth behind her back and her ears swivel, though her eyes are hooded lazily. Rey maintains a serene pose of meditation, but her mind is far from clear.

            “Aw c’mon, that was just rude!” Poe cries in indignation as Qarhara takes his other knight. The tawny-furred Togorian shrugs, baring his canines in a toothy grin.

            “You left it there for the taking! What was I supposed to do, ignore a golden opportunity?”

            “You _did_ say you’d go easy on me this time.”

            “Yeah, but then you added money into the equation, my friend. I don’t screw around when it comes to money.”

            “Fair enough. Where’d you learn to play like that anyway?” Poe wonders as he goes to move his bishop, then reconsiders and moves it the opposite direction. He hisses ‘shit!’ when Qarhara takes that too. But the Togorian’s face has fallen into a thoughtful frown.

            “… My eldest sister,” he answers at length. “She taught all our littermates how to play. She was the only one ever around anyway, with mama in the lab all day and papa only visiting once a year.”

            “I didn’t know you had an older sister, or any other siblings, for that matter.” Poe says, softer this time. Meeran blinks once and turns her ice-blue gaze on the pilot.

            “We don’t anymore. It’s just Qarhara and me, now.”

            “…I’m sorry,” Poe eventually says. But Qarhara just shrugs. The cheery smile is back on his face, though he keeps his eyes on the holo-board.

            “Nothin’ fer you to be sorry for. It’s the First Order we blame, and I think we’re doing a pretty good job getting back at them.”

            “Our honor as a family would be forever tarnished if we didn’t,” adds Meeran.

            The boys finish up their game soon after, once Qarhara finally stops toying with Poe and puts him in a brutal checkmate. Poe pouts as he transfers the owed credits over to the winner. The pair of them are re-setting the holo-board when Rey stands, brushing her trousers off. She holds out a hand to the board, switching it off and then floating it over to herself to confiscate it.

            “Hey!” cries Poe, “What about the rematch?”

            Rey flashes them a thin smile before handing the board to Meeran, who stashes it in the lapel of her tunic while shooting a stern glare at her brother. Rey explains,

            “I think that’s enough for tonight. We’re up at 05:00 hours tomorrow. Who wants first watch?”

            Meeran looks at her evenly. Poe and Quarhara wrinkle their noses. Rey rolls her eyes.

            “Fine, I’ll take it. You guys can draw straws for the other three. But seriously, go to sleep. I better not hear you messing around. Got that?”

            “Yes ma’am,” Poe says with a mocking salute. Rey scoops up her knapsack and the rod of her saber-staff. She bops Poe gently on the head with it, telling him he’s an ass. The insult holds no sting- he just grins his friendly grin at her, wishing her goodnight. Then she leaves the ruins via the crumbling doorway.

The three moons are just beginning to rise as she scrambles on top of a pile of stone that was probably a tower, long ago. It’s the best vantage point she’ll find, in this labyrinth of tumbled walls and worn-down statues. She sits with her back against one of those statues, whose features are so degraded that it’s impossible to tell what it’s supposed to be. The statue has six protrusions that could have been legs, and here and there Rey can feel a texture carved into the stone that may have once been feathers. Once she’s seated, she sits very still and opens her senses up to her surroundings the way Master Luke taught her. She casts her roots into the land and listens to the dim night, alert for signs of danger.

            Because she’s so in tune with the land and not with her own mind, she almost doesn’t notice the familiar pulse that signals a connection. It takes her by surprise when she hears the clatter of pebbles tumble from underneath Kylo’s feet.

            “Rey? What are you doing?”

            Her eyes snap open and she leaps to her feet at the sound of his voice.

            “You!” she exclaims. “What are _you_ doing? This is a bad time!”

            “Why, is there someone coming?” he asks, looking over both shoulders. Rey hisses,

            “No, but I’m on first watch tonight! Keep your voice down, they’ll hear you.”

            Kylo nods his understanding. Rey notices, now that she’s got a second look, that his eyes are downcast. He whispers as he asks her,

            “Where the hell are you? There’s an odd energy coming from you- I can’t tell where you are. It’s all fuzzy.”

            “That’d be the ruins,” Rey murmurs. She can’t help but glance over her shoulder, just to make sure. “I’ve been feeling it all night. It’s called the Malabar Construct- it’s not even marked on the maps. It just showed up as a footnote.”

            Kylo shudders. Rey can see the artificial lighting around him and the corner of his writing desk- he’s safe in his own quarters on the _Supremacy._ But apparently he can sense the same aura she does.

            “I’ve heard of that place,” he tells her. “Ruins so ancient and secret, no record of them exists. No one knows their original purpose. How did you find them?”

            “We stumbled across them looking for shelter. It’s supposed to storm later tonight.”

            “Mm. Have fun with that,” he quips.

            “Yeah well, at least I’m not breathing recycled air,” Rey grumbles in return. “What have you been doing with yourself anyway? You look like Bantha shit.”

            It’s true- there are soft, dark circles under his eyes, like he hasn’t been sleeping, and there’s a gauntness about him. She wonders if he remembers to eat.

            “That’s not important right now,” he insists, waving his hand like her thoughts are flies that he’s shooing away. “I… I have something to tell you…”

            “Yeah, what?” says Rey when he trails off. Kylo still won’t meet her eye, but his jaw and lips are working as if he’s chewing on his intended words, and finding them distasteful. When he does finally speak, it all tumbles out in a rush.

            “Hux is setting up a trap for your Resistance. We believe that you hijacked a shipment of crystals from one of our research projects, and Hux thinks that he can set up an effective ambush for you by calling for a second crystal shipment and then purposefully leaking information on it. I’ll try to insert myself into the plan if I can, but there are no guarantees.”

            Rey stares at him. Confusion and awe war within her for a few moments, but eventually gratitude wins out over both. A wry smile creeps across her lips. She chuckles,

            “You’d be right about the crystals. They’re called Kybarra, aren’t they?”

            Kylo forces a stiff nod.

            “Well… thank you,” Rey continues. “I appreciate the warning.”

            “I don’t suppose I can convince you not to go,” he murmurs, crossing his arms. She shakes her head resolutely.

            “Too risky not to. Hux expects us to go after it, and if we don’t, he might think we somehow found out about the ambush. I doubt it’ll be good for you if he finds out there’s a whistleblower in your midst.”

            Kylo flinches at the word ‘whistleblower’. It’s apparent that he’s only interested in keeping _Rey_ out of Hux’s clutches, and he doesn’t like the fact that his warning is benefitting the Resistance as a whole. But Rey figures that he’ll just have to deal with it. She’s a General, after all. Her interests are the Resistance’s, and vice versa.

            “… No chance of convincing you to let someone else go in your place?” he suggests at length. She just laughs.

            “Of course not! I’m the field General, remember?”

            “It was a long shot anyway,” he sighs.

            “Would you at least like to see what I made out of your crystals?” she asks, reaching for the cold metal rod that lays strapped across her back. She’s very proud of it after all, and she wanted to show _him_ the most. She’ll enjoy rubbing her success in his face. Despite himself, Kylo leans forward a tad to look over her shoulder, to get a glimpse at it. Rey smiles internally. She knew his scholarly curiosity would win out in the end.

            She slides it out from between the straps and takes a step back, holding it horizontally out in front of her. The center rod is about two and a half feet long- like she took the center of her staff and chopped either end off. She re-adjusts her hand around the grip, and hits the ignition switch.

            Kylo’s eyes go wide. Just as they said- it’s a vivid shade of violet, so bright and intense that Rey looks like she’s bathed in purple fire. The double-blades of the saber-staff crackle a bit before settling down, except for the occasional streak of lightning racing along the blades. The hum of the plasma is low and steady, like the purr of a cat.

            “So it _is_ a staff, then,” murmurs Kylo, taking a tentative step forward and bending down to get a closer look. Rey holds the weapon steady so it won’t chop his nose off. “There were some reports saying it was two separate blades.”

            “It can be that too,” says Rey. Kylo just raises one eyebrow at her.

            “What do you mean?”

            “I rigged it so I can separate it into two. See?”

            Rey puts her other hand on the center rod, twists it counter-clockwise, and then pushes inward with both hands. About twelve inches of the center section collapse inward, shortening the piece significantly. Then she twists clockwise, and with a soft _click,_ the handle separates into two pieces, each with one short blade attached.

            Kylo is opening his mouth to comment on the innovative design when he realizes something is happening to the plasma blades. His mouth remains partially open in bald shock as, right before his eyes, the two blades re-shape and elongate into full-length sabers, with fine, narrow points.

            “H… how did you do that?!” he stammers. He keeps blinking as if he expects to un-see what he just saw. Rey just smiles smugly.

            “The Kybarra crystals are unique. They’re like none of the other crystals in that shipment. I had to meditate with them for two whole days non-stop before they connected with me, but once they did, it’s almost like they Bonded with me, the same way you and I are Bonded. They do whatever I want them to. They can even copy the properties of other crystals I’ve meditated with. Like this, see?”

            She closes her eyes for a moment. The two blades shorten again, until they’re just a little longer than a pair of fighting knives. Then all the color and nearly all of the light seems to flush right out of them, leaving behind nothing but a ghostly glow. Rey switches her grip on them so she’s wielding them back-handed, and slashes the air in front of her a couple of times. The saber-knives are completely silent, and impossible to make out except as faint streaks of light that baffle the eye.

            “Just like Ghostfire…” murmurs Kylo, his eyes wide and fascinated. “Is there anything else they can do?”

            “Like I said- any crystal I’ve meditated with before, they can copy. I can make the blade burn cold instead of hot, I can make them acidic, and I can decrease or increase the power however I like. I can make them any color I want too, but they always revert to violet.”

            As she’s speaking, the two blades resume their previous forms. The low purring resumes. Just like before, they take a moment to stabilize, and even after that, they still kick off sparks every once and awhile, like the crystals’ power is barely contained. Kylo wonders what it is about Rey that makes them react so powerfully. Is it because she herself is strong in the Force? Maybe that’s why the research teams can never get an accurate reading on them. Maybe they react in proportion to the inherent power within each person.

            Kylo points at the one closest to him and asks,

            “May I see that?”

            Rey shrugs as she reverses her grip on the handle and holds it out to him.

            “I mean you can try,” she says, “but they don’t-”

            She trails off as his hand closes around it. He holds it out before him, testing the balance, then gives it an experimental twirl.

            “It’s incredible, you can almost feel it pulsing through the handle… like it has a heartbeat,” he murmurs. He inspects the handle, noting the folded rings within the base, which lock in place with a series of simple hitches that line up perfectly with one another depending on which way you twist it. There are electro-magnets set in the center of the collapsible part that presumably keep the two pieces together when Rey wants to wield them as one staff. He does notice, however, that the switch is a simple on/off button, not a dead-man’s switch like most lightsabers. The blade remains lit even if the user releases the switch, which is potentially dangerous.

            When he goes to hand it back to her he realizes that she’s staring at him wide-eyed. She doesn’t try to take the lightsaber from his outstretched hand. Just stares.

            “…What?” he prompts, “Is… is everything okay?”

            It takes Rey a moment to find the words. She stammers out,

            “It… they… they’ve never responded to anyone but me before. They won’t stay lit for anyone else.”

            “Really? No one?”

            “N-No! Th… they usually shut off if anyone else touches them!”

            “Not even your friend, the traitor?” Kylo wonders, feeling a slight thrill of victory. He takes another, more appreciative look at the purple lightsaber. No wonder they don’t have a dead-man’s switch. She expects them to turn off the moment she lets go of them anyway.

            “They won’t turn on for Finn or Rose or Poe or… or anyone! Not even if I give them permission. So… why are they responding to you?”

            Kylo can’t answer that, and the question makes him slightly uncomfortable, so he once again offers her the lightsaber back. She takes it this time. With a click and a twist, she re-attaches the two handles and pulls them back out into one seamless piece. Then she switches them off. Without the fiery purple light, they both feel as if they’ve been plunged into darkness.

            A few moments of thoughtful silence pass. Eventually, Kylo sighs and asks the other question that’s been burning in him since he saw her.

            “So when and how did you make these anyway? What prompted the sudden desire to have a weapon again?”

            Rey smiles again, and there are a few faint recollections flashing over her end of the Bond- memories of the past weeks. She offers them to him, and he takes them gratefully. He watches it all happen as if through her eyes, but in fast-forward.

Her inspiration for wanting a new lightsaber is simple. Mostly, she remembers what it was like to spar with Kylo and have him treat her staff like a saber. The feeling was good, if short-lived, and it inspired her to take another look at his grandfather’s lightsaber. But though she meditated with it, she found that she couldn’t force it to comply, or figure out how to fix it. It was almost like the thing didn’t want to be fixed. She just learned what she could from it, and then went in search of her own kyber crystals. The other two Generals of the Resistance had encouraged and even funded her quest for components, since they believed that it would be good for both morale and recruitment if their Jedi General was seen wielding one of those legendary weapons, the lightsabers, on the field. Kylo can’t argue with that logic- he himself knows how awe-inspiring it is to be seen as a leader on the battlefield, using that glowing sword which is a terrifying mystery to most people.

            Rey found her components on the black market, comparing things to the broken blue lightsaber to make sure she had the right pieces. And finally, the rumored First Order shipment from the Unknown Regions contained crystals as she’d thought, but more crystals than she’d ever dreamed. She’d thought that going after the rumored shipment would be a wild goose chase at best.

She meditated with each and every crystal, trying to find one that clicked with her the way the blue lightsaber no longer did. Sometimes it took her a few minutes to cast a crystal aside, sometimes a few hours. But she eventually rejected them all, until finally, she touched the Kybarra crystals. She felt it. The thrumming potential of them.

She had to forge a personal Bond with them in the Force and convince them to trust in her, for they are almost like sentient things themselves. But now that they’re hers, the weapons she’s created feel like natural extensions of herself- the best she could possibly ask for.

            And through all this, she never used a single piece of Kylo’s family’s lightsaber. She took it apart to examine it, but put it back together as it was. She saved it- for him.

            Surprised and touched, Kylo blinks once at her.

            “You didn’t use it. My grandfather’s lightsaber, I mean,” he comments. Rey shrugs.

            “I felt it was time to make something more suited to myself. Something no one else could lay claim to. What did you _expect_ me to do with it?”

            “In all honesty, I expected you to have cannibalized the pieces.”

            “I thought about it,” she replies without shame. “I don’t like to waste perfectly good components when they can be made into something new and useful. But this thing… it’s different.”

            She reaches out of his line of sight to rifle in a bag of some sort, and pulls something out to show him. When he looks down at her hands, his eyes widen. It’s there- his grandfather’s lightsaber, in two pieces, the blue kyber crystal glinting dully within the casing. He’s overwhelmed by the urge to reach out and grab it right now, but he knows that the moment the connection fades, it’ll disappear. So he just looks at it hungrily. Rey doesn’t seem to notice. She continues in a thoughtful murmur,

            “I carry it with me all the time now… When I was meditating with it before, I felt something. I don’t even know what it could be. It was like the ghost of an emotion, or a thought, or a voice… I could feel the history in it, like someone was trying to speak to me through it. I’ve always felt it since the moment I first touched it, I think, but now I feel like… I dunno. Maybe I was meant to come across it, and use it for awhile. I learned what I needed to know from it so that I could stand on my own two feet, instead of relying on the strength of others’ past. But I wasn’t meant to keep it. It has a different ultimate purpose that I’m not a part of.”

            “Like what?” Kylo prompts. She just shrugs again.

            “That’s the thing: I don’t know. But maybe… maybe it would do more good in your hands. Maybe you can learn more from it than I can. It runs in _your_ family’s blood, after all. Do… do you want it?”

            Kylo blinks in surprise. This was the last thing he expected- to have her willingly offer the lightsaber back to him, just when he’s finally resigned ownership of the thing. He’s thought of it as mostly being hers, ever since they broke it in the throne room and she absconded with the pieces. He would have gladly let her keep it, so for her to give it back is… is…

            “I’d be honored,” he eventually says. His tone of voice is ambiguous enough that it could be interpreted as a sarcastic comment or a genuine statement. He himself isn’t sure which it is. Rey flashes him a bright smile, as if she doesn’t notice at all.

            “Great! I’ll try to get it to you the next time we see each other in person. Maybe at the ambush?”

            Kylo forces a nod.

            “Yeah, I’ll see if I can convince Hux to bring me along.”

            “We should… probably come up with a plan for that, so neither of us gets killed or exposed.”

            “I’ll let you know when I have more details about Hux’s operation, and I suppose we can go from there.”

            They trail off into somewhat awkward silence, which stretches on for moments that feel like hours. Until, eventually, Rey suddenly snorts with laughter. The noise is so sudden in the quite nighttime forest that Kylo jumps.

            “Look at the pair of us,” Rey sighs, still laughing a bit to herself. “Using a mystical Force Bond to gossip and scheme! We’re a couple of idiots, you know that?”

            Despite himself, Kylo feels a wry smile twitch over his lips

            “I suppose we _have_ started taking it for granted, haven’t we?” he chuckles.

            Rey, who can’t quite contain all of her mirth, stares in thinly-veiled wonder at that smile. Her ears seem to ring with the sound of his quiet little laugh- like the rare echo of thunder over the Jakku desert. So foreign and out-of-place that it almost frightens you, but you’re as delighted as you are startled. She wants to hear it again.

…

            She is still grinning after the connection inevitably fades, and after she trades watches with Qarhara.

            “What’s so funny?” the Togorian whispers as he takes her place, pointing to her smile. His voice is muted, though. Even he seems to be sensing the unnatural silence of this place, because for once he keeps his voice down. She just shrugs.

            “Ah, nothing. I had a thought.”

            “Well share with the class, huh?”

            “Meh. You wouldn’t think it’s funny,” she insists. Qarahara sticks his tongue out at her as she’s leaving, and she laughs again at his childish antics. Then he settles in for the watch, idly sharpening his retractable black claws on the bole of a nearby tree. Rey returns to the low embers of the fire, picking her way around the sleeping forms of Poe and Meeran. She falls gratefully into her bedroll, holding her saber-staff tight in one hand. Just in case.

…

            Approximately 1.5 days after Kylo last saw Rey, he hears in a routine report that one of their undercover teams in Hutt Space, which was trying to uncover and block Rebel supply lines, has dropped off the map. They stopped responding to comm check-ins, and when the First Order sent another agent in to check on them, the agent found their hidden base of operations completely empty. The agents, their notes, and all the intelligence they uncovered so far are gone. The only thing left behind, and the only sign of the struggle that surely ensued, is a long score melted in the wall and a single shattered window, mostly likely broken by a stray blaster-shot. Kylo would have bet whole planets that the score in the wall is from Rey’s lightsaber.

            _So_ that’s _what she was up to,_ he thinks, not without a hint of bitterness.

It’s certainly a loss- the agents on that team were top-quality, with years of training, experience, and months of accumulated intelligence. Kylo is in a sour mood for the entire rest of the day. Knowing Rey, the agents haven’t been killed. The Resistance probably captured them and questioned them, and is holding them prisoner until they either defect or an opportunity comes up to trade them. In all honesty, he would have preferred the agents dead than captured.

His mood only gets blacker when General Hux requests an audience. Kylo has been listening to reports and complaints and requests from various First Order commands all day- he’s beginning to hate this stupid square throne he sits on. At least the throne room isn’t blood-red anymore: he’s done a little re-designing since he claimed the repaired _Supremacy_ for his own. The light is clean and white- the floors and walls a sterile, glossy black. His own regal outfit is trimmed with deep red, his cape clasped at one shoulder with a massive, darkly colored garnet. It constitutes the only flash of color in the room, besides Hux’s ginger hair and the angry flush slowly creeping up the General’s neck.

“Supreme Leader, I really don’t think these excursions are a good use of the First Order’s time and money-”

“They are if I say they are,” Kylo cuts him off. He sits rather lazily in the big chair with his legs crossed, his elbow on the armrest, and his head propped in one hand. The fingers of his other hand _tap-tap-tap_ against his knee. Hux gets a little redder in the face.

“That’s no justification for the expense of all these wild Bantha chases, _my lord,”_ the man says, spitting the words ‘my lord’ as if he resents them. “Not to mention the security risk every time you decide to attend personally! You have yet to choose a corps of personal guards, and until you do, it is highly inconvenient for you to leave the main body of the fleet. We simply don’t have the manpower to divert a protection detail for you. The troops are spread thin already.”

“There are some things that cannot be trusted to underlings, General,” Kylo snaps. “I don’t expect you to understand the nuances of the knowledge I seek, small-minded as you are, but you may take it on good faith that my ‘wild Bantha chases’ will yield fruit for the First Order in time.”

“All due respect, _my lord,_ but I fail to see how your personal superstitions-”

“That’s exactly it,” interrupts Kylo. “You _fail._ My predecessor- _your_ former Supreme Leader- understood the value of the Force as a weapon. Just because you do not, doesn’t mean it is useless. I will not have my actions questioned by someone who is not only beneath me, but has no clue what he’s talking about. So until you have something meaningful to say, Hux, you will leave my presence and cease disrespecting your Supreme Leader.”

Kylo takes pleasure in the way Hux swells up, looking like he’s .02 seconds away from exploding. But the General walks away all the same, holding himself like there’s something stuck firmly up his ass.

This, thankfully, concludes Kylo’s business for the day. He’s grateful to retreat from the throne room and make his way to his own quarters, where he can have privacy and space to pursue his own interests. It’s later than usual, and he still hasn’t eaten. Since he’s not scheduled to dine with anyone important, he’ll take his meal alone in his quarters, like he usually does.

The storm troopers form up around him when he exits the throne room, escorting him across _The Supremacy._ In all honesty, Kylo hasn’t chosen a personal guard yet because he doesn’t trust anyone in the First Order enough to give them 24-hour access to him. The Knights of Ren all perished at Kylo’s hand when Snoke pitted them against each other in a gladiator-style competition for the position of the Supreme Leader’s apprentice. Kylo hasn’t found anyone equal to them since then. So he settles for the standard escort of storm troopers, and the protection of his own hand and his own vigilance. He doubts anyone in the First Order would dare attack him, and if they did, it would be the last mistake they ever made.

_Now Rey,_ he thinks, as he usually does, _she’s a foe to be reckoned with. I’ll never forget the look in her eyes when she gave me this scar. There was snow in her hair… I could have pushed her off that cliff if I’d wanted to… could have ended the fight there. But I didn’t, and I thought I was in control. That’s a mistake I definitely won’t make again._

His thoughts keep coming back to her. Sometimes it’s in anger, sometimes in fascination. But it’s always the same endless circle. He can’t seem the break out of it, even when he’s justifiably cross with her.

_I swear, next time I see her, she’s gonna get it,_ he internally rants, still thinking about the failed undercover mission. It galls him that she steals his men and his supplies and the loyalty of his people right from underneath him, then smiles to his face and offers her tentative friendship to him as if it’s the most natural thing in the galaxy.

But when he does finally reach his quarters and shut the door on his guards, he immediately reaches for the pile of data-stacks and the holo-pad he’s been using to translate the ancient language of Rey’s Jedi texts. It’s become routine. No matter how much she annoys him sometimes, he’s too genuinely curious about the texts to give up on them. Not even to spite her.

He’s got every character in the Galactic Basic alphabet translated now. But the ancient language has a myriad of extra characters as well, all specialized for certain vowel and consonant combinations. He’s pretty sure a few of them are supposed to be clicking noises, too, which he doubts the human mouth is capable of forming. So he’s currently programming a computer algorithm to filter out the superfluous characters and form full words in the alphabet of Galactic Basic. If the algorithm works, he’ll be able to scan each page of text and then the holo-pad will process the data for him.

Translating the meaning of the words into something comprehensible is a different matter, but that’s a problem for later. At the moment he’s just worried about making the mysterious runes into something intelligible- something he can read and pronounce. Maybe he can get a protocol droid to compare the sister-languages and translate the meaning to Galactic Basic later on. For now, he buckles down and focuses on writing the code for his algorithm.

He works all through his supper, picking at his food with one hand and typing with the other. The plate grows colder and colder as the difficult coding consumes more and more of his attention. Finally, he hits a roadblock and, try though he might, he can’t seem to find the right command protocols to get around it. In a fit of frustration, he picks up a bowl of gravy and turns to fling it at the wall behind him-

“ _Kriff!_ Watch it, Ben!” exclaims Rey, throwing her hands up in front of her.

Kylo jumps in surprise, stumbles backwards, and then damn near throws his back out trying to regain his balance. He drops the gravy bowl.

He has no idea when the connection happened or how long she’s been watching him, but he’s suddenly very choked up on the fact that Rey is wearing nothing but a rather short sleep-shirt and is sitting _on his bed._ Her hair is half tied-up in a messy bun, her eyes bleary as if she’s just woken up.

Logic dictates a moment later that she’s not sitting on his bed- she’s sitting on _her_ bed, which just happens to have lined up with his in this particular Force-Bond. But that’s not before he’s had to swallow hard and make a conscious effort to control his expression. It’s all he can do not to blush like a dumb schoolboy. By all that’s holy, he can see _every inch_ of her legs, which are strong and quite shapely. He has to tear his eyes away.

“I, uh… sorry about that,” he stammers dumbly. Rey is glaring peevishly.

“Well… I’m awake now anyway,” she sighs, “and the Force saw fit to connect us for _some_ reason. What is it you’re so mad about?”

“It’s an… an algorithm. For translating the Jedi texts,” he haltingly explains. He picks up his holo-pad and pads across the room to hand it to her. She snatches it away and immediately begins scrolling through the lines of code. Her nose wrinkles a bit.

“I see what you’re trying to do, but it’s a little… clumsy,” she mutters. Before Kylo has time to be offended, she’s deleted the last twenty lines of coding and is re-writing it. Once he sees where she’s going with it and how neatly she’s solved the problem, he can’t even be annoyed. He’s just sheepish that he didn’t think of it himself.

“Coding isn’t my forte,” he growls, to cover up his discomfiture.

“Well that’s what you’ve got me for. And I’ve got you for all the linguistic shit.”

“Aren’t we just a pair?”

“Exactly what I was thinking,” Rey quips as she offers the holo-pad back to him. Their fingers brush as he takes it from her. As he’s glancing over the changes she’s made, Kylo remembers a thought he had earlier in the week that he wanted to share with her. Their fingers touching reminded him, and so he asks her now-

“By the way Rey, I’ve been thinking about something. I was wondering if you have any theories on-”

“-Why we can touch objects in each others’ surroundings but we can’t seem to hurt each other through the Force Bond,” she finishes, sounding almost bored. “Yeah… I’ve been wondering that too. I remember I tried to shoot you, the first time we saw each other on Ahch-To. Didn’t work.”

“While I’m glad for that,” Kylo huffs, “I’m still curious as to _why_. Would you run a test with me?”

Rey sighs again, sounding tired, but shrugs.

“Sure, why the hell not.”

Kylo summons his lightsaber. He asks Rey to hold out her hand- she does so, trustingly. She doesn’t even flinch when he ignites the saber. He expected her to be wary, but she sleepily accepts it even as he’s slowly bringing the blade closer to her flesh, as if she knows he wouldn’t intentionally hurt her at this point. The knowledge that she trusts him like that makes his chest swell.

Kylo brings the plasma blade just inches away from her skin, then pauses there.

“Anything at all?”

Rey shakes her head; her sloppy half-bun bobs a bit with the motion.

“I can’t even feel the heat. Bring it a little closer.”

“I don’t want to burn you-”

“You big coward, just give it here,” Rey growls. And to his surprise, she swipes her hand right at the lightsaber. He jerks it away, though not in time. Her hand passes through the blade as if she’s made of air. He’s shaken, but relieved when he sees that she’s taken no harm. She even holds out her hand to display the lack of burns and severed fingers.

“See? Not hurt. I think it has something to do with the plasma. Maybe the Force Bond can only handle so much energy transfer, or… something like that.”

“Yeah, the plasma… that must be why,” Kylo murmurs in reluctant agreement as he turns the saber off and drops it on the table. He somehow doubts the truth of that statement, but he keeps it to himself, behind the careful mental walls he’s built. He double-checks that she can’t sense his doubts through the Bond. Sometimes the ease with which she reads his mind is unsettling- he’s used to examining others’ thoughts, not being examined himself.

They pass a few moments in a silence which can only be described as awkward. Then Rey points a finger at the holo-pad and says,

“So uh…. Yeah. Let me know when that algorithm is done. Or if you need more help with it. I’m just gonna… go back to sleep.”

“Of course. Goodnight,” Kylo automatically responds. He then mentally kicks himself for sounding lame, but Rey is already turning over and laying back down in bed. Either she didn’t notice his awkwardness, or she doesn’t care.

Kylo watches as her breathing evens out and her body seems to melt into the mattress. He waits for the connection to disappear. The sight of her asleep in his bed ( _it’s not my bed, it’s her bed, it just_ looks _like it’s my bed,_ he reminds himself,) is disconcerting to say the least. But the connection doesn’t fade even after she’s dozed off. So Kylo tentatively sits back down at his desk, where his food is cold and forgotten. He resolves to just keep working on the programming until she’s gone, and _then_ he’ll go to bed.

The quiet rhythm of her breathing behind him is soothing. Kylo is unconsciously listening to it as he works. It’s been awhile since he could just sit with someone in companionable silence: since he was _comfortable_ with anyone, even in the simplest capacity. The longer he sits there and works, the sleepier he gets. His mind seems to smooth out, like a stirred-up pool of water settling back down into glassy stillness. The algorithm practically builds itself, and he loses track of how long he sits there, listening and working, waiting for Rey to disappear but secretly glad that she hasn’t.

The next thing he knows, he’s waking up to the blaring screech of his alarm with his head on his desk. He jerks upright and glances around; it’s morning already, and Rey is gone, the sheets cold where she was lying.

_When did I fall asleep?_ He thinks peevishly as he drags himself over to his holochron to turn off the alarm.

            Only now does it occur to him that he forgot to be angry at Rey. It completely slipped his mind.

…

            Finn usually takes ‘training time with Rey’ with a grain of salt. After all, she’s only ever had three teachers: herself, the occasional battle with Kylo Ren, and Luke Skywalker, who didn’t really show her any lightsaber techniques at all. And of the three, surely fighting Kylo Ren must have been the most informative. Finn wasn’t there, but she was probably terrified for her life on Starkiller base, and later on the _Supremacy._ Copying what she saw Ren do was most likely her best chance at surviving. Plus, fighting against Ren is the most practical lesson in lightsaber technique she’s ever had. So it makes some sense that her fighting style would mirror his in some ways. Right?

            Finn reminds himself of this when he ends up on his ass in the sand for a third time. The songsteel sword in his right hand is practically humming with the vibrations of its impact with Rey’s kybarra lightsaber. She’s currently wielding just one of the bright violet blades: the other is hooked on her belt. She grins triumphantly and then offers him a hand to help him up. He takes it, offering her a token smile in return.

            “Sorry about that,” she laughs, switching off her saber. “Gotta be quicker next time!”

            “I dunno, I think I’m getting pretty good with this sword,” says Finn, giving it a twirl. The Rebels stole the songsteel from an arms dealer who supplied the First Order, and Rey fashioned the raw material into a long, slender blade for him. She said when she gave it to him that she never wants him to be caught off-guard by a lightsaber again. He has to admit, it’s a really nice weapon, and well-suited to him. The songsteel is resistant to plasma blades and blaster shots, just like a lightsaber; but it’s heavier, more predictable, and altogether safer for him to use. The only reason he didn’t chop his own arm off with Luke’s lightsaber on Starkiller base was because of his melee training from his stormtrooper days, and the adrenaline of his brush with death. This songsteel sword is a vast improvement, in his opinion.

            “Wanna go again?” asks Rey, sliding her feet into stance. Her fingers twitch near her belt, eager to draw and get back into the savage dance. But Finn just shakes his head with a rueful grin.

            “’Fraid not,” he sighs, rubbing his sore backside. “You’ve bruised me up one too many times. Go beat on someone else for once, why don’t you?”

            “Fine, be that way,” Rey pouts with mock indignance. “I’ll go ask Meeran. She’s more fun anyway!”

            “More equal competition, you mean,” quips Finn, sheathing his sword. “You’re like, eight times faster and stronger than me. I never stand a chance!”

            Rey immediately insists, “I don’t think that’s true! I might be stronger and faster, but that’s only because I use the Force. And your technique is so much better than mine. I’m learning from you all the time!”

            “Seriously?”

            “Of course! I wouldn’t be where I am today if it wasn’t for you. _You’re_ the one who inspires me to keep training.”

            “Are you sure that’s not General Avix you’re talking about?” jibes Finn with a cheeky grin. Rey rolls her eyes.

            “All due respect to my colleague, but he can shove it up his ass. I’m training to be a Jedi because I want to- not because he thinks it would be good for the Resistance. The fact that it’s helping the cause is just a bonus.”

            “Still,” he says with a shrug, “He _does_ have a point about morale. Have you thought about what he said?”

            Her scowl is all the answer he needs. He sighs impatiently.

            “Come on, Rey. You’ve said it yourself- you’re the last of your kind. You can’t let your knowledge and skill die with you one day.”

            “And I won’t,” she insists, “but right now, in the middle of a war, is not the time to take on students. Besides- I barely know anything about being a Jedi. I’m still fumbling along making mistakes, trying to teach myself. How can I teach another?”

            “They say the best way to learn is to teach. I’ve learned more from training the Traitor Squadron than I ever would have thought!”

            Rey smiles fondly at him. He really does love his growing squadron of defectors. They number about fifty now. The ex-stormtroopers called themselves the Traitor Squadron as a joke, but it stuck. Training them and settling them into their new, independent lives as Rebels has given Finn a fresh purpose. He really hopes that Rey can have the same thing, some day.

            “Just think about it,” he says at length.

            “I will. See you later, for lunch? I thought we could take it outside today, with Rose and Poe too.”

            “Sure thing! I’ll bring the tuber stew!”

            Rey makes a choking noise as Finn waves good-bye and turns for the exit of the training cavern. If she ever has to eat another tuber again she might actually vomit her guts up. They’ve had nothing _but_ tubers lately. The fish-protein around their underwater base on Tharuss is getting harder and harder to catch. Some of their nets and fishing equipment come back all torn-up and broken. They’re not sure if the lack of fish is seasonal, if it’s because of the base’s steady population increase and their own overfishing, or if it’s because there’s something out there, chasing the fish away. Rey remembers her encounter with the ocean creature that almost killed her- that living black hole- and suspects it’s the latter. They won’t starve because of it, but she always feels an icy shiver race up her spine when she passes by the viewports. They’re covered now after her encounter, but she can sense the blue-black shadows shifting outside of them, an endless, teeming, cold void.

            She hurries past the view-ports with a shiver. She heads to her rooms to clean up and change before lunch. Then, after she’s eaten, it’s on to yet another strategy meeting with the Generals. She spends about half of her time with them, and the other half out on missions. Her position as field General is taxing; she falls into bed every night exhausted, though the burn in her limbs is satisfying.

            Free time is as scarce as ever, but now at least she can spend it in comfort. She likes closing the door of her quarters behind her- the sound of the latch clicking is comforting. It’s privacy she’s never had before. She unties her hair, shakes it out, and then arches her back in a stretch. She’ll have a cold shower, she thinks. They have a water heater, of course, but the filtered salt water is cool and soothing. Cold showers are a novelty to her- she never tires of sitting under the uneven stream, shivering lightly at the waters’ icy touch.

            She shucks off her sweat-stained tunic and removes her belt. Then off comes the undershirt, and the leggings next. She dumps them in a pile on the floor with the rest of her dirty clothes from that week. She’s not the most cleanly person, and her room is a bit of a cluttered mess. It doesn’t bother her. She kicks the pile aside, reaching behind her to undo the clasp of her breastband.

            As if on cue, there’s a pulse in the Force, and then the soft sigh of someone breathing in. Rey’s come to know the sound just as well as the she knows the door-latch. She rolls her eyes, replaces the clip of her breastband, and turns at the same time as Kylo.

            He’s standing by her bathroom door as if to block her way, which annoys her even though she knows his placement is unintentional. The Force has very little regard for their relative positions in space, when it connects them. His mouth is half open as if he’s about to say something, but he halts in place when his mind processes the fact that she’s half-naked. The apple of his throat bobs as he swallows, and then his eyes drag upward to meet her gaze. There they resolutely remain, though his face is visibly flushed. Rey feels a thrill of the basest, most savage victory. Who’s blushing _now?_

            But payback can only go so far, she thinks. She lets him have a good look, then sniffs frostily and snatches up her linen bathrobe. Kylo clears his throat as she’s tying it closed.

            “Is there something you need?” he asks, as if _she’s_ the one who’s _intentionally_ intruded on him. She’s immediately irritated- it’s not like she can control these connections any more than he can.

            “No. You?”

            “Not really. What are you doing?”

            “What’s it look like?”

            “Interrupting me, I think.”

            “How can I interrupt if you’re not doing anything important?”

            “I’d hardly call the running of most of the galaxy’s government unimportant.”

            “You mean running the galaxy’s ruthless, oppressive war machine?”

            “You’ve been talking to that Rose Tico character, haven’t you?” says Kylo with a roll of his eyes. He snatches a holopad from a table in what looks like a library of some sort, and sits in a chair that Rey can only just see the shape of.

            “Don’t talk shit about Rose,” Rey growls. “She’s my friend.”

            “You seem to have a lot of those,” comes his immediate reply. Rey crosses her arms.

            “Yes, I do. The Resistance is a family. We’re strong that way, which is why we’ll win this fight one day. Sooner than you think. Just watch- it’ll happen.”

“Being promoted has really made you bold, _General.”_

“And it’s certainly made an even bigger ass out of you, _Supreme Leader.”_

“At least the First Order isn’t hiding on the edge of the known galaxy.”

“At I have friends, which is more than _you_ can say.”

This strikes a nerve. Kylo’s eyes dart up to her face, glaring darkly from beneath knitted brows. He then looks back down at his holopad and continues typing, his fingers stabbing the screen.

“As much as I’d _love_ to debate galactic politics with you, if we want to avoid killing each other we might want to avoid that particular pitfall.”

“Fine,” growls Rey, sitting on the edge of the bed and crossing her legs. “We’ll debate something else. Are you done that algorithm yet?”

It’s been a few days, though not much more. Rey expects him to say no, and sputter and fluster about it, but to her surprise he just taps his holopad a few more times and then thrusts it out at her silently, as if daring her to take it. She snatches it out of his hand and scrolls through, determined to find some error she can criticize him for. She goes past the point he was at last time, past the edits she made, and all the way to the end, and to her surprise, finds nothing wrong. Not a single flaw. Everything forward from that point is coded almost flawlessly: the way _she_ would have coded it. Now it’s her turn to frown. She thinks uneasily of the first time she and Finn ever sparred with each other, and Finn’s voice, saying with equal parts fear, awe, and accusation,

_You fight like_ he _does._

She wonders if it’s not mere coincidence, that her fighting style is like his, or that his coding abilities have suddenly improved. Are they unconsciously gleaning information from each other over the Bond, skimming skills and memories and information like a tern skimming fish from the surface of the water?

Could she skim intelligence on the First Order from him?

Rey immediately shoves the thought out of her head, though she knows it will be back soon enough, no matter how often she banishes it. She’d never forgive herself if she did that to him, and he wouldn’t forgive her either. She’s not even sure if he even forgave her for leaving him in the throne room, or if she forgives _him_ for trying to kill her on Crait. To violate their tenuous trust now would ruin every step towards peace with him Rey has made.

But will she be able to sleep at night if she _doesn’t_ do it? Does abstaining from such a golden opportunity make her an enemy to the Resistance which has become her whole life?

A frown creases Kylo’s face. Rey has a brief moment of panic when she thinks that Kylo must have sensed her traitorous urge over the Bond. But no: her mental walls are firmly in place, as they always are nowadays. The function of shielding her mind is second nature to her by now, like breathing. Kylo can’t hear her mind, he’s just… watching her. Reading her. He asks,

“Is there something wrong with the coding?”

“What? No, no.”

“Then what is it? You look bothered.”

Rey pauses, fishing for something, anything, to say. Eventually she stammers,

“Oh, I was just… uh…wondering how the next part of the translation process will work. This program will help us make words out of the runes, but it won’t help us understand the words any better.”

He waves a gloved hand dismissively.

“That’s a question for later. There’s plenty of ancient tongues in the lingual databank to compare with. I’m sure there’s a sister language somewhere that we can pull meaning from.”

Rey isn’t quite sure what all of that means, but she nods anyway.

“Okay then, next question,” she says after clearing her throat, “How are you gonna put the texts into the algorithm?”

Kylo sighs tiredly.

“Well the holopads can’t scan something that isn’t physically present. I guess I’ll have to copy them out by hand, whenever we connect.”

Rey looks horrified.

“That’ll take ages! We’ll be useless old geezers before we learn anything from them!”

“I don’t see another option,” he says with a shrug, “Unless you can find some way to get the texts to me directly.”

Rey frowns in thought as she hands the holopad back to him. Her leg bounces absentmindedly. Then something occurs to her all in a flash, like a gift from the universe.

“Wait- didn’t you tell me awhile ago Hux is setting up an ambush for the Resistance?”

“Yes, but I don’t see how-”

“What if you and I met up at the ambush? I could make copies of the texts and give them to you then.”

Kylo looks at Rey like she’s sprouted a third arm.

“…That is quite possibly the worst idea I’ve ever heard,” he says at length. “You and I would both be expelled from our respective positions instantly if anyone learned about our little… _conversations_. They’d name us traitors and kill us on the spot, in fact.”

“That’s why we’ve got to make it look good,” Rey insists, standing up so she can pace. “You and I both have to find legitimate reasons to insert ourselves into the ambush and counter-ambush plans. Then, at the ambush, we’ll cross paths seemingly by accident, and fight. I’ll wear a bag or something with the texts in it, and I’ll lose it during the fight. Then I’ll escape, leaving the bag with you.”

“No,” Kylo instantly responds, shaking his head. “You shouldn’t even be at the ambush at all. And even if we did go through with this, there’s a billion things that could go wrong. The ship could blow up. The ambush could succeed, and you’d all be captured. I could accidentally hurt you in the fight.”

“That never bothered you before,” Rey points out coldly. “You’ve already tried to kill me twice, and I kicked your ass both times.”

He reddens and looks to his right, avoiding her eyes. He mumbles,

“That was different.”

Rey considers arguing with him, but if his sullen look is anything to go by, he already knows. He’s just mad that she had to point it out. So she swallows the nasty comment she’d prepared and says instead,

“You saved my life in the throne room. Consider that recompense for Starkiller, I guess. But you still owe me one from Crait. We’re doing this thing, whether you want to or not. You’re gonna be there at the ambush, you’re gonna put on a convincing show, and then you’re gonna translate those texts for me. Then you and me will be even. Deal?”

He looks back up at her, chewing his lip. The crooked angle of his jaw is almost endearing as he thinks it over, exuding resentment the entire time. But he eventually gets to his feet with a sigh, offering her a hand to shake.

“Fine,” he mutters. “Deal.”

They clasp palms briefly, all business-like. The leather of Kylo’s glove is warm. He’s the first to let go. He shoves his hands in his pockets and glances around her room as if searching for something.

“Well, I suppose we ought to start right away, while we have a minute. You’ve got a lot of work to do between now and then.”

“Why, do you know when the ambush will happen? Is it soon?”

“No- the planning will take at least a month, with Hux in charge. But there’s a lot of text for you to copy out, and you’ll have to do it by hand.”

Rey then remembers something: an important detail she may have overlooked. Her face reddens as she says,

“About that… I uh… I don’t actually have paper or a pen like yours. I was thinking maybe I could scan the texts onto a holopad and then just give you that.”

Kylo twists his mouth to one side, shaking his head ruefully.

“I’m sure that’d be easier, but the risk for you is too high. Hux could easily trace the pad back to you, even if you wipe its memory. It’s safer to do it the old-fashioned way. Paper is untraceable. You can probably find what you need in a novelty shop somewhere.”

Rey just nods without saying anything more. She bites the inside of her cheek awkwardly and looks away, self-conscious under his gaze. Kylo narrows his eyes at her for a moment, but then seems to realize all at once what the problem is. He exhales quietly as he murmurs,

“…You don’t know how to write, do you? Of course not, when would you have had the opportunity?”

Rey’s blush deepens- the shame is making her throat tight. But to her surprise, Kylo just touches her shoulder with a gentle ‘hey’, to get her attention. His face softens when she looks at him.

“It’s okay. I should have realized,” he insists, in that gentle voice which he seems to reserve just for her. “You don’t need to be embarrassed. I can show you how. Here-”

He turns away to rifle through a leather folio of some sort, which is resting on a table next to his chair. He pulls out a sheet of paper, then fishes his pen out of a pocket inside the lapel of his jacket. He hands them both to her. She’s seen the pen a couple times before, but never held it, so her fingers feel awkward as she takes it from him. She stands there holding the objects and looks at him doubtfully. But where she expected him to be impatient, he just beckons her over to her workbench, which rests against the wall next to her bed.

“Here, sit down. It’s easier when you’re seated. Set the paper down flat, there. Are you right-handed or left-handed?”

“Ambidextrous.”

“Oh. Well then, uh… just use your right hand for now. Keep the paper still with your left. You hold the pen like this.”

He leans over her and re-arranges her fingers around the thin stylus. The sleeve of his jacket brushes her shoulder. He’s very close all of a sudden, but she doesn’t feel threatened at all by it, like she once did. All the warmth rushes to her head when she catches a whiff of his scent: metallic, but clean, with some faint, spicy sweetness coming from his hair.

Once he’s satisfied with the way she’s holding the pen, he shows her to start from the top-left and move towards the bottom right. He wraps his hand around hers and guides it gently across the page. The first character he shows her to make is _resh,_ then _esk_ right next to it, and then lastly _yirt._ The strokes are large, clumsy, and crooked, nearly illegible, but Rey’s eyes widen anyway. _‘Rey’,_ it spells.

She’s written her own name, for the first time in all her nineteen years.

Kylo gives her a moment to take it in. When he speaks again, she can practically hear the smile in his voice. His lips are close to her ear, his words quiet.

“So that’s the Aurebesh alphabet,” he says, indicating the characters she’s just written. “The Jedi texts have a very different rune system, so I guess you’ll just have to practice copying them by eye as you go along. I’d recommend doing a few practice pages before you get down to the real work. How does that sound?”

Rey grins widely, and behind her, Kylo swells with pride because _he made her smile._

“That’ll work,” she tells him, oblivious of his quiet elation. “Can… can you do yours?”

“Do what?”

“Your signature. How you write your name.”

He pauses for a moment, hesitating. Then she feels him nod quietly behind her. He takes the pen back for a moment and, in rapid, precise strokes, etches out three characters on the line below hers: _besh, esk, nern._

_Ben._

They both look at the paper for a moment, unsure what to say about it. At length, Rey clears her throat to dispel the uncomfortable silence and says,

“Well it’s a lot neater than mine.”

“It’ll come easier with practice,” insists Kylo. He sounds strained. So Rey takes the pen again, eager to try a second time, to feel his hand guiding hers, and to forget about that moment of unwanted tension.

“Show me how to do mine again,” she commands. Kylo exhales slowly as they bend over the paper again, stirring her hair with his breath. His fingers cage hers gently. The second time, the letters are smaller and not quite so slanted. Rey looks over them with pride.

And that’s when she hears the _click_ of her bedroom door opening.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Dun-dun-DUNNNNNNNNN


	8. Dissension in the ranks

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which the galaxy begins to suspect, very deep in their heart of hearts, that there might be something up between the Jedi General and the Supreme Leader. Might be. Just maybe.  
> Meanwhile, the Force is banging its head on the wall of the universe like Tulio in El Dorado
> 
> Ya'll I am SO tired, it's been a rough-ass week and it's only Wednesday. I hurt all over. Send help.   
> But on the bright side, THE SUSPENSE IS OVER! ENJOY MY TRASH-FIRE OF A RESOLUTION!

            Rose doesn’t bother waiting for Rey to answer her door any more- she’s used to just knocking to let Rey know she’s coming, and then waltzing in. The General has an open-door policy, so her friends are in the habit of coming and going at will whenever the door’s not locked. The girl raps her knuckles on the doorframe, her mouth open to ask Rey what the hold-up is. Lunch is getting cold- she, Poe, and Finn have been waiting on the terrace for fifteen minutes.

            That’s when Rose’s eyes fall on the workbench.

            She’s only seen Kylo Ren in person once, when he crashed Leia’s funeral. Here, in Rey’s bedroom, is the last place she would have expected to find the Supreme Leader of the First Order, and so the sight of him bent over Rey’s workbench with one arm practically wrapped around her is more than a shock. Both he and Rey have frozen in place, their eyes wide. After a moment of shocked staring, Rose’s mind jumps to the obvious conclusion- he’s trying to abduct Rey.

            Rose bares her teeth like a snarling Loth-cat, yanking her tazer from her belt. In the same moment, Rey (clad only in her bath-robe) leaps to her feet, shoving Ren aside and holding out her hand appealingly to Rose.

            “Wait!” she cries, only a little louder than Ren’s exclamation of _‘shit!’_

He disappears.

            Rey looks over her shoulder at the place where he was, unsurprised. She lets out a relieved sigh. Rose, meanwhile, is staring in utter shock. It’s like he just blinked out of existence: like he was a ghost, or wasn’t there at all.

            “What…. the hell…did I just see…?” Rose wonders, her voice cracking. She meets Rey’s eyes, and the Jedi looks guilty. Too guilty.

            “Rose, I can explain-”

            “You’d BETTER!” Rose shouts. Rey winces, looking at the door, and Rose realizes it’s still open. The girl takes a deep, deep breath and closes it behind her. She reluctantly sheathes her tazer, giving Rey a chance to put on some pants. When the Jedi turns back around, she’s composed herself and put on her ‘General’ face. She sits on the edge of the bed and calmly pats the coverlet next to her. Rose eyes the spot with distaste, but slowly takes it anyway. Her arms cross over her chest and her eyes narrow.

            “What was Kylo bloody Ren doing in your room? And where’d he go?” she growls.

            “Did Finn ever tell you what I told him about what happened on the _Supremacy_?”

            “No, why?”

            “Well, the version of events that everyone accepts- the version the First Order put out- isn’t _quite_ the truth. It started on Ahch-To, when I was training with master Luke…”

            Rose listens with warring feelings of fascination and horror as Rey describes, in detail, how the Force saw fit to connect her and Kylo’s minds across lightyears of space and time. She nods with approval when Rey recounts how she instantly tried to shoot Kylo the first time she saw his image on Ahch-To. Her brow furrows in deep thought as Rey relates everything that was said, all the way up to her vision of the future. Rose’s jaw drops when the Jedi describes how she attacked Luke, out of anger and betrayal, demanding the truth. And when Rose finally learns the truth herself, her gut twists with something that could be either sympathy, pity, or disgust. She’s not sure. And then finally, Rey tells her what happened in the throne room, and all of a sudden Rose isn’t sure of _anything_ anymore. If Kylo Ren isn’t a ruthless killer, but he’s still the Supreme Leader, but he wanted Rey to rule by his side, but he nearly blew her up when she refused, then who _is_ he?

            “Do you understand why I had to go to him, on the _Supremacy_?” Rey asks. Rose thinks about it, then eventually nods.

            “You thought you could turn him, right? Make him good again?”

            “Something like that. I dunno… maybe I was just desperate for whatever hope I could get. I knew the Resistance was on its last legs- I had to do _something.”_

“You put a lot of trust in him,” Rose points out, half-critical, though half admiring. “He could have just killed you when Snoke told him to. How did you know he’d save you?”

            “I… I didn’t. But I know I _felt_ something in him when we touched hands, and he felt something too. I think… I think his offer to co-rule was his own twisted way of trying to make up for everything past, to mend bridges. He genuinely thought he was doing what was best. I don’t think he was really in his right mind at the time anyway… alone in his own head for the first time in god-knows-how-long. I can’t imagine what that feels like… Still, I was foolish for thinking he would just _change_ on the spot. I was foolish for thinking that I could _make_ him change, because it’s not that simple. He has to get his own act together, because it’s _his_ choice, not mine.”

            “And that’s why you didn’t kill him, when you woke up?”

            “Exactly. Though, sometimes I wonder if it would have been easier for all of us that way.”

            Rose shakes her head vehemently, picking up Rey’s hand where it rests on the cover.

            “No! No- you were right to let him live. It’s not your fault he reacted badly on Crait. It’ not your fault he turned back.”

            “But that’s the thing,” interrupts Rey, her brow furrowed deep in thought, “I don’t know if he’s really turned _back,_ per se. There was one more connection on Crait, just before the _Falcon_ took off. I saw him… I saw him kneeling on the floor in the control room, in the mine. He looked up at me, and I can’t be sure, but I think he wanted to say something, he just… didn’t have the words. He was trying to speak with his eyes. I don’t know if it was regret or… or guilt, or accusation, but there was _something_ in the way he looked at me… I closed the door on him.”

            Rey remembers the way he flinched, just before the connection faded. She wishes she didn’t remember.

            “… I take it the connections didn’t stop happening, though.”

            Rey slowly shakes her head.

            “No. The Bond is still there. I thought it would go away if I just didn’t think about him, but it stuck around. He kept trying to get back in, all the time. I shut him out, but I could feel him whispering to me… sometimes he was angry, sometimes sad, and sometimes I think he just needed someone to talk to… When Leia was dying, I used it so that Ben could say goodbye. It was the last thing I could do for her. That was the first time I’d spoken to him since Crait. And since then, the connections have been happening every few days, pretty much on a regular basis.”

            “Kriff, no wonder…” Rose murmurs, too shocked to really formulate an opinion on this information.

            Rey watches her friend with more than a little nervousness, waiting to see what Rose will say. Eventually the girl formulates some more questions- the pressing ones, of course. Not the bigger ones that she doesn’t want to think about. She asks,

            “Does… does Ren know where you are? Does he know where _we_ are?”

            “Not exactly… We just sort of _sense_ each other, I think. It’s not something you can use a map for. But yes, if he wanted to, he could find me just about anywhere. That’s how he figured out where Leia’s funeral was.”

            “So he knows where we’re hiding, and he… he chooses not to act on it?”

            “As far as I know, yes. I don’t think he’s told _anyone_ about the Bond. People would ask too many questions. I doubt the First Order would tolerate him as their leader if they found out. And I haven’t told anyone here either for the same reason.”

            “Probably smart,” nods Rose. She bites her fingernail absentmindedly. “Does it go both ways? Could you steal things from his mind if you wanted to?”

            “Maybe. He’s better at the whole mind-reading thing than I am. Still… I think… I might be wrong, but I think we’ve been unconsciously learning things from each other all this time. Ever since the first time he touched my mind, on Starkiller base, I’ve known things about lightsaber fighting that no one ever taught me. He might have also learned coding from me, though I’m not sure. We’ve swapped memories by accident, and every once in awhile I’ll feel some emotion that’s not mine. It scares me, sometimes.”

            “Yeah, but like… could you learn First Order secrets?”

            Rey’s eyes slide away, and her whole aspect reeks of guilt.

            “I mean… probably,” she admits at length. “I’ve thought about it. But there’s no guarantee that he wouldn’t notice if I tried to steal information from his mind. If I betrayed his trust, there’d be nothing stopping him from giving our coordinates to General Hux.”

            Rose shivers at the thought.

            “Can’t you… I dunno, just cut the Bond off?”

            Rey closes her eyes like she’s about to be sick, and her grip on Rose’s hand tightens, almost to the point of pain.

            “I’m not sure. I don’t think I wanna find out. It’s a part of me now, Rose… it’s like a limb. I’m honestly not sure it wouldn’t kill us both, if the Bond broke. I… I’ve thought about leaving the Resistance, to keep you safe. But then I’d have nothing, I’d be so alone again, I…”

            Rey’s voice trembles like she’s on the edge of tears. She takes a hard breath before Rose can offer any words of comfort, and just like that, her composure is back. The look in her eyes is determined when she finally opens them again.

            “You see why I couldn’t tell Finn about the Bond?”

            “Yeah, that was probably smart,” says Rose sheepishly, “He hates Ren. But he might come around in time. Eventually you’re gonna _have_ to tell him, before he finds out from the wrong person.”

            “I know. And I will- but not yet. It’s not the right time,” Rey sighs, squeezing her friend’s hand.

            “If not now, then when?”

            “I’m not sure. I’ll know when the moment comes, I think. Until then… will you keep it secret, Rose?”

            The girl considers it, fingering the warm metal of the pendant that hangs around her neck. At length, she nods and flashes Rey a smile.

            “I guess I can keep mum for a little while.”

            “Oh, thank you Rose, thank you so much!” the Jedi gushes. She folds Rose into a tight hug that nearly crushes the air out of the girl’s lungs. Rose just laughs and pats her shoulder comfortingly.

            “Anything for a friend,” she murmurs.

            “You have no idea how long I’ve wanted to tell someone! Anyone at all! I just wasn’t sure if there was anyone who would understand. I’m glad you do.”

            _Yeah,_ she thinks, _I understand plenty now. I understand that you’re in love with him. The Supreme Leader of the first order, and a General of the Resistance, in love. Kriff, of all the people she could have picked. And yet… if she sees something in him, maybe there’s hope after all. Maybe Han Solo and Leia Organa’s son still lives. Maybe the end of this war is in sight!_

Rose feels her chest swelling with a hope bordering on joy. But when Rey finally lets go and meets her gaze again, the Jedi’s face has gone somber.

            “Rose, there’s one more thing I need to say.”

            “What is it?”

            “Well, uh… Ben warned me about something awhile ago. I’ve been trying to figure out a good way to broach the subject with Avix and Halsey, since it’s a delicate matter. You remember that shipment of crystals we hijacked from the Unknown Regions?”

            “Yeah- you found your lightsaber crystal in it. We’ve still got them in storage. Why, what’s the matter with them?”

            “Nothing, it’s not that. It’s just… General Hux suspects that we were the ones who stole them. He’s setting up an ambush for the Resistance. He’s calling for a second crystal shipment, then he’s gonna leak information on it. He’s betting that we’ll go for it, and he’ll be ready to trap us when we do.”

            Rose’s jaw goes slack.

            “Seriously?! UGH! That weaselly little bastard!”

            “My thoughts exactly,” sighs the Jedi.

            “And Ren told you this?”

            Rey nods.

            “Yup. He doesn’t seem to care much about the Resistance as a whole, though. He just wants to keep me out of danger. Still, he warned us, and that’s something.”

            “We’re not going, right?”

            “Well actually, I was thinking-”

            “-No WAY! It’s too dangerous! We can’t give General _Sux_ the satisfaction!”

            “We have to,” argues the Jedi. “If we don’t take the bait, he’ll suspect that we were warned. It’ll blow Ben’s cover. Think of this as an opportunity. We can set up a counter-ambush, get away with the crystals, and blow up a few First Order vessels while we’re at it. Ben says he’ll keep me updated on the plans as they take shape. He’s gonna find an excuse to come along personally. That way we can hopefully minimize the damage.”

            “He’d do that for you?” Rose wonders, raising a skeptical eyebrow.

            “I think so. He’s been helping me with another project, and it’s in both our interests to meet up at the ambush.”

            “What kind of project?”

            Rey eagerly jumps up and fetches the Jedi texts from the drawer in her nightstand. Everyone’s seen her studying them during her free time, poring over them as if she expects the useless runes to re-arrange themselves for her. But as Rey explains how Kylo has been de-coding them using the First Order’s lingual data-banks, page-by-page, Rose starts to see how the texts might not be so useless after all.

            “That’s pretty cool!” the girl exclaims, carefully turning a brittle page. “You know, I’ve never held a book before. They’re so old…”

            “There’s so much we can learn from them, if we can just understand what they say,” Rey sighs. “That’s why it’s important that I somehow get a copy to Ben.”

            “Well if you want another pair of hands, I know my letters.”

            “Really? You’ll help?”

            “Of course! This is important. I might not like Ren on principle, but if you say you trust him with this, then so do I.”

            Rey takes Rose’s hand again and squeezes it.

            “Thank you.”

            The two girls smile at each other, their eyes sparkling with their shared secret, and their shared purpose.

            Rose sticks around while Rey finishes her shower and comes out to lunch, as planned. But right before they leave the Jedi’s quarters, Rose taps the door handle and says to Rey-

            “By the way, you probably wanna start locking this.”

            For some reason the two girls find this intensely funny, and they’re still giggling when they arrive at the broken-down terrace, which sits just a few feet above the sea level. The cracked transparisteel windows don’t keep all the ocean spray out, so the stone tables and benches are slick with seawater. But barring the wetness, the view is nice and it’s a nice place to share a meal with friends. Rose and Rey sit near each other, with Finn between them. He hands them each a sandwich and asks what they’re laughing at. Rose insists that it’s nothing really, giving him a peck on the cheek in greeting. But behind his back, Rey and Rose share a conspiratorial grin.

…

            General Hux hasn’t always been respected, and he hasn’t always been powerful. But he’s always had a few traits that cut him out for power: he’s observant, logical, and subtle. He sees; he categorizes; he acts. Forming a plan of action based on available information is as simple a process as breathing, for him.

            So when the Supreme Leader shows up late to a security briefing five minutes late, looking ruffled and pale, Hux notices. This isn’t the first time either- on the rare occasion when Ren shows up to meetings on time, he usually spends the duration tapping an impatient finger against his knee, and staring into the middle ground as if his mind is lightyears away. He seems especially distracted today. If Hux didn’t know better, he’d say that Ren was worried about something.

            _“What goes on in his head?”_ the General wonders, scrutinizing the Supreme Leader from across the table as Marogon, Phasma’s successor, delivers her debriefing.

            The woman cuts an imposing figure. Her armor, like Phasma’s, has a reflective chromium surface that is polished to mirror-like perfection. But hers is tinted a deep blood-red, with the First Order’s symbol inlaid on the breast in onyx. Her skin, which is so dark it’s nearly black in the flat light of the conference room, gleams almost as bright as her armor. She was Phasma’s own choice for the next Captain of the Supreme Leader’s troops, having formerly been a part of the FN squadron which Phasma was so proud of. Hux’s own opinion of the woman is tainted by the fact that the rogue FN-2187, now known as Finn, came from the same squadron. But Ren, after sparring with Marogon once and very nearly losing to her, seems to hold her in high esteem. He stripped her of her designation number, allowed her to re-claim her birth name, and welcomed the woman into his high command without question, once she’d been vetted. Hux isn’t quite ready to trust the upstart yet, though. He constantly has to remind himself to call her by her name, and not her designation. She’s quite touchy about that, and she could probably snap him in half with one hand, if the mood took her. Crossing her is generally considered a bad idea.

            Marogon points out on a map projection which of their intelligence operations have been compromised by the recent disappearance of their undercover team. The Rebels are making a real nuisance out of themselves, and it galls Hux that they haven’t been wiped out yet. One would think, with the way they’ve been making their comeback, the Supreme Leader would be more motivated to crush the Resistance entirely. But he, unlike his predecessor, seems much more focused on the expansion efforts. He ignores Hux when the General insists that destroying the Resistance is the best way to secure total control of the existing territories. While the Resistance survives, and even thrives, it is impossible to completely stamp out all the pockets of rebellion that remain within the First Order’s control. Ren doesn’t seem to share that belief, despite Hux’s extensive education and experience on the subject.

            _“Perhaps he’s afraid of the girl- the one from Jakku. Stars know, most of our troops are terrified of her by now. The girl who slew Snoke and all of his guards, and nearly killed Kylo Ren…”_

Somehow, Hux isn’t quite so sure that the girl is wholly responsible for the destruction of Snoke’s reign. True, Rey of Jakku is a formidable enemy. But she can’t be as all-powerful and indefatigable as her reputation makes her out to be. Ren _must_ have had something to do with it- it makes no sense otherwise. Hux himself has killed for power before, though always with a bit more finesse. He wouldn’t put it past Ren. The way Snoke brutalized the man all those years, no wonder he came to resent his master…

            Both Hux and Ren glance up, slightly startled, when Marogon halts-midsentence and clears her throat loudly.

            “Are _either_ of you listening to me, sirs?”

            Ren offers her a cool nod.

            “Of course, Captain. Please continue. You were discussing the status of the remaining undercover teams.”

            Marogon sighs, but goes back to her previous line of thought. The Captain asks Hux what he wishes to do about reconnaissance teams 24A, 37E, and 15D. Hux, who has only been half paying attention, glances up. Ah, yes. Those three could potentially be compromised by the recent disappearance, though it’s uncertain what their risk of discovery is. To be safe, they should be withdrawn from the field, before their intelligence falls into the wrong hands. Most of the other undercover teams in the region have been recalled, their missions scrapped. The First Order intelligence network in the area will have to be re-built from scratch. But, looking at the three glowing marker on the map, Hux feels the germ of an idea come to him.

            “Recall 24A and 15D, effective immediately. Send them the kill-code command and have them rendezvous at the extraction point, as planned. But leave 37A in the field. Send the memory-scramble command to their chips, and then plant the information on shipment #892643 on their datapads. I think that’ll be a good place to start the leak.”

            The Supreme Leader looks up sharply at this.

            “Shipment #892643?” he prompts. The General knits his fingers under his chin, avoiding eye contact with Ren.

            “Yes. The Research team for Project #92 is putting together another shipment, as bait for the ambush.”

            Hux’s plan for the Resistance doesn’t have a mission designation, since the people in this room- Hux, the Supreme Leader, the high Command of the First Order fleet, and Ltn. Mitaka- are the only people who are aware of it. Only 13, in the entire galaxy. Too many for Hux’s liking. They just call it ‘the ambush’, and only Hux himself is aware of all the details.

            “Why am I just now finding out about this? I thought I requested to be kept in the loop on your plan,” says Ren. Hux grinds out between clenched teeth,

            “All due respect, _my lord,_ but the secrecy of the operation is more secure the fewer people who know of it. Compartmentalization-”

            “ _Compartmentalization_ doesn’t apply to your Supreme Leader,” Ren cuts him off. “You and I will be having a conversation in private after this, General. I expect a full briefing.”

            “But my lord, I’m due to appraise a new squadron of troopers directly after this, I can’t-”

            “Then _be late,”_ hisses the Supreme Leader. Hux presses his lips into a thin line. Both men turn their attention back to the Captain, who is glaring peevishly from one to the other.

            “Are we finished?” she wonders. Hux glances at Ren out the corner of his eye, expecting the Jedi-killer to reprimand Marogon for her insolence like he just reprimanded Hux. But the Supreme Leader just waves a cool hand to her.

            “My apologies, Captain. Please continue.”

            Marogon nods, taking this cordiality as her due, and returns to outlining her proposition for troop placement in the compromised area. Ren listens to her patiently, nodding his approval every once in awhile. Resentment boils like molten magma in Hux’s gut.

            _Oh, so SHE gets the respect due to her station, but not me? I’m a bloody GENERAL! She’s just a glorified storm trooper! The least he could do is show a little deference to his high command, Supreme Leader or not-”_

“The answer to your question is ‘yes,’ General. Captain Marogon has proven herself worthy of my respect. I’m still waiting on you, though,” Ren hisses quietly as Marogon pauses to pull up the next projection. Hux starts in his seat, caught between guilt and outright rage.

            “Dammit Ren- I mean, my lord- you can’t just-”

            “Trust me, I wouldn’t, but you just _think_ very loudly. If you don’t want me to hear, then stop projecting all the time.”

            “I’m not _projecting_ anything, I’m-”

            “Yes, you are, or I wouldn’t be able to _hear_ you every time a bug crawls up your ass!”

            The two cease whispering under their breaths when the Captain shoots them a warning look, then launches into the final part of her briefing, which is mostly meant for the rest of the high command: the various admirals and commanders whose jobs it is to command the troops she assigns them. While the rest of the conference room bickers amongst themselves on how to best husband their troops, Hux and Ren glare at each other almost non-stop. Ltn. Mitaka takes notes so that Hux doesn’t _really_ have to pay attention.

            As the rest of the high command is wrapping up their debate when Ren leans towards Hux a little and says under his breath,

            “It would seem that the Captain thinks you’re very childish, General Hux. _She’s_ been projecting that sentiment quite strongly for the past ten minutes.”

            “Actually,” Marogon loudly interrupts from the other end of the conference table, “I think you’re _both_ childish.”

            Mitaka, who heard the whole exchange, giggles before Hux turns and silences him with a withering glare. But the Supreme Leader just lets out one sardonic, eerily humorless bark of laughter.

            “Perhaps you’re right, Captain. The esteemed general does tend to bring out the very worst in people.”

            A titter runs down the length of the conference table, unabashed by Hux’s volcanic fuming. As the Ren delivers his approval of Marogon’s plan and closes the meeting, Hux internally seethes-

            _At least Supreme Leader Snoke didn’t tolerate such tomfoolery in his ranks!_

_…_

Kylo has his ‘private talk’ with Hux in the throne room after the debriefing, and takes more than a little pleasure in holding his lightsaber about 3 inches away from the man’s skinny neck while he does. It’s probably not the most diplomatic method of communing with one’s underlings, he reflects after Hux has left the audience chamber looking worse for wear. But the General is, as Snoke once called him, a cur. And it’s hard to keep curs in line with words and diplomacy alone. It never hurts to remind Hux who really holds the power, both physically and symbolically.

            Once the General is gone, Kylo sits on his throne and meditates on what he’s learned for a few minutes before his next audience. He has a lot to mull over.

            Hux’s plans are more advanced than he’d imagined. The General has it all laid out to the last detail, in typical Huxian anal-retentive fashion. It’s just a question of execution now. Hux is going to send the transmissions to the 37D team the next day. The team members, all storm troopers who have been specially trained for undercover missions, have chips in their heads that enable remote scrambling, transmission of emergency messages, and even a remote kill-switch. The memory-scramble will shift their conscious perception of their current knowledge in such a way that they either won’t properly remember what they’ve learned, or they won’t have the words to articulate. The process does permanent brain damage, though they’ll live, and they’ll be operational for awhile longer before the true dementia sets in. That’ll be long enough for the Rebels to uncover them, and take the bait.

            He’ll have to let Rey know immediately, the next time he’s alone. He can’t wait around for a Force-connection to show up: the leak will be out within the next 36 hours, and if she’s to formulate her counter-ambush, she’ll need the details as soon as possible. He’ll have to reach out and contact her himself.

Besides that pressing need, he’s also shaken by what happened in her bedroom, before. The pair of them had been so distracted, they didn’t hear the Tico girl coming. Why, Force’s sake, _why_ didn’t Rey lock her doors? He has no idea what’s happened to her now- the connection blinked out before either of them got a chance to say anything. He’s anxious to know if the secret’s out to the Resistance, if Rey’s been endangered by their discovery. Personally, he wouldn’t be too broken up if the Resistance kicked her out- she’d be more likely to come to _him_ for help and comfort, which he wouldn’t mind that at all. But if they lay a finger on her, so help him…

            Kylo gives his head a shake, pinching the bridge of his nose. He’s supposed to be holding audiences now- he can’t be thinking about that right now. He has to prioritize. What was he considering before?

Ah, yes. The ambush plans, and the scheming General Hux. Kylo is growing uneasy at Hux’s continued, but subtle, disobediences. Today’s little drama is just the latest in a long string of small but significant offences. If it wasn’t clear before, the Supreme Leader has made it _explicitly_ clear now that he’s to be given constant updates on the ambush’s progress. Hux won’t defy him a second time, under pain of grievous injury. But the fact remains that the General kept it secret from him before, and his excuse about ‘consolidation’ doesn’t cut it. Kylo told Hux under no uncertain terms that he no longer trusts the General to carry out the Supreme Leader’s orders properly, and Kylo will be attending the ambush personally. Hux’s spluttered excuse about the ‘security risk’ didn’t cut it either. Hux is a schemer- it’ll pay to keep a close eye on him.

            When Kylo has organized his thoughts, he hits the buzzer on the arm of his throne to signal the guards that he’s ready for the next audience. They open the throne room’s double-doors to allow the next petitioner in. To his surprise, it’s none other than Marogon. The woman strides into the center of the room and then goes down on one knee before the throne, her jet-black cape splaying on the polished floor behind her like bat wings.

            “My lord.”

            “Captain. Has something come up since our briefing?”

            “No, my lord. I wished to speak to you in private.”

            Kylo raises one eyebrow, intrigued. Marogon is quite frigid and formal as a general rule, so this is unexpected, to say the least.

            “Why the confidentiality?”

            “Sir, I’ve heard some disturbing rumors and amongst the ranks,” she begins, her deep voice measured and careful. “I thought it would be wise to discuss them with you first before acting on the problem.”

            “…Go on.”

            “Sir, every once in awhile I run routine checks where I remotely turn on the short-range transmitters within the troopers’ helmets while they’re in their barracks, on down time. I do this so I can get a sense of what they talk about when they think no one’s listening. Usually they’re asleep when they ought to be, or if they’re talking, it’s just locker-room talk. But lately they’ve been saying things behind closed doors. I believe, based on the recent rumors, that a significant glitch has arisen in the programming. It’s beyond what we initially thought.”

            “I thought the number of defectors was still low enough to be inconsequential.”

            “All due respect, sir, but no number of defectors is inconsequential. The amount of troopers who have _acted_ on traitorous thoughts is still low. But the number of troopers who _talk_ and _think_ about it is growing. No one ever defected from the First Order and lived to tell the tale before FN-2187. The longer he remains alive, the deeper the dissention spreads.”

            “Have none of our bounty hunters turned up leads on him?”

            “No, sir. They’ve brought us the heads of one or two deserters, but no more. None of the ones who defected to the Resistance have been confirmed dead yet. The number of troopers-turned-Rebels grows in twos and threes every week. Rumor has it they’re calling themselves the ‘Traitor squadron’. FN-2187 is said to lead them. He names them and then trains them in Rebel ways. From the scarce reports I’ve gathered thus far, the Traitor squadron is intensely loyal to him. They’ve carried out more than six confirmed strikes on the First Order thus far, and succeeded every time. They’re small, but highly coordinated, with an intimate knowledge of how we operate. It’s possible that they may be training other Rebels in our methods as well. The Rebel fighting pattern has changed in the past few weeks- they’re getting harder to track, harder to kill.”

            “Surely not every captured storm trooper defects.”

            “Of course not. Several of our number have dropped off the grid and haven’t been seen since. My bet is, they remained loyal to the First Order even after they were captured, and are either incarcerated or dead. But… the majority of our prisoners of war turn up on the battlefield again soon after capture, on the other side. And from what I’ve heard, they don’t seem like they’ve been pressed into service. They fight _willingly,_ sir. FN-2187 ‘inspires’ them, apparently.”

            A seed of annoyance writhes in Kylo’s belly. _Finn._ The one who wouldn’t shoot. The one who got away with Dameron, with Rey, with _his_ family’s lightsaber. What he wouldn’t give to have that man’s head on a platter, regardless of what Rey would feel. What he wouldn’t give to have every single one of his precious Traitor Squadron _dead._

            “And you say the ranks have been talking about him?”

            “Yes sir. It’s becoming more and more common. Most of the talk is casual, in passing. Very few have dared to speak openly with approval- they know very well what we’ll do to them. We’ve made examples out of a few. But the fact that they’re talking about it at all, negatively or positively, is troubling.”

            Kylo narrows his eyes. He folds his hands under his nose, tapping one finger against his knuckles absentmindedly. At length, he looks down at Marogon and asks,

            “You were part of the original FN unit with 2187. What do you think pushed him to revolt against the programming?”

            Marogon shifts in place. Her gloved fingers tighten over her knee, though she keeps her eyes carefully lowered.

            “As cadets, 2187 always showed an unfortunate predisposition for compassion. There was a member of the unit, FN-2003… we nicknamed him ‘Slip’ because he was always falling behind. Phasma called him the weak link. 2187 would regularly stop to help Slip during simulations, slowing the group down. Phasma reprimanded him for supporting the weak link. If I didn’t know better, I would have said that Slip and 2187 were friends… Slip died in the massacre of Taunul village, on Jakku. Stray blaster-shot. He took his last breath in 2187’s arms.”

            “Hm… friendships in the ranks, huh?”

            “It’s a common anomaly. We usually deal with it by separating the offenders. It rarely warrants re-programming.”

            “Perhaps that’s the problem…” Kylo murmurs, mostly to himself. He thinks about it for a moment, then asks,

            “Marogon- why do you fight for the First Order?”

            “S-sir?”

            “Why do you fight? What motivates you?”

            “…It… It’s all I know, sir. All I have. It gives me power and purpose where I had none. The First Order will bring peace to this galaxy one day, and I will be on the right side of history when it does.”

            Kylo brushes carefully against Marogon’s mind to test the truth of her statement, and finds to his satisfaction that she really, truly believes this. She is devoted to the throne: she followed it with fervor when Snoke sat upon it, and she serves it with the same fervor now that Kylo has claimed it. That loyalty is why Kylo trusted her in the first place, and he is glad to see that it endures.

            As he withdraws back into his own mind he asks her,

            “And FN-2187: why did he fight?”

            Marogon looks up at him and blinks in confusion.

            “I… I don’t know sir. He was programmed to.”

            “He didn’t care about the cause, is what you’re saying. He had no reason to fight for the First Order except that it was all he knew.”

            “I suppose.”

            “Would you say this is true for many of our troops?”

            “Not all of them, sir.”

            “I didn’t say ‘all’. I said ‘many’.”

            Marogon looks back down.

            “Most storm troopers in our army are flawless. They are moved by General Hux’s orations, and they would gladly die for the cause. They are the majority, sir. But… yes. There are also plenty who don’t truly believe. There are those who fight simply because they are conditioned to. It is how we program them, sir.”

            “…If you could change the programming, how would you do it?”

            “Change the… programming?”

            “Yes. Change the way storm troopers are trained. Change their directives.”

            “I would make it stricter, sir. Weed out all those who show signs of treason and make examples of them.”

            Kylo brushes up against her mind again, without her knowledge. He ruefully shakes his head at her.

            “Captain, I didn’t ask you to spout back _Phasma’s_ opinion to me. I asked how _you_ think it should be done.”

            Marogon meets his gaze again. Her jaw shifts like she’s biting the inside of her lip, and her brow is knitted in deep thought.

            “I… I… I would make them care, sir. On a… personal level.”

            “The way you do.”

            “Yes. The way I do.”

            After a long pause, Kylo offers her a polite nod.

            “Very well. We’ll issue a  temporary change in protocol- you can expect a formal memo later today. Stop separating apparent friend groups amongst the ranks. Allow our troopers to form personal attachments to one another, to a reasonable degree. I would like you to monitor their performance in the following month and report back to me on any changes. If they show improvement, we can make the protocol-change permanent. Does that seem prudent to you?”

            “Yes, my lord. Very much so.”

            “Good. Thank you for your honesty, Captain. You may go now, if that’s all.”

            Marogon gets to her feet and bows low. She then leaves without another word. The doors swinging shut behind her sends an unusually loud _clang_ through the chamber, and then Kylo is alone with his thoughts again.


End file.
